Our Approach
Sri Lanka, Trafficking program, worker rights, forced labor, human trafficking, Solidarity Center

With dozens of international offices, the Solidarity Center engages directly with working people in Sri Lanka and around the world. Credit: Solidarity Center/Sean Stephen

The Solidarity Center empowers people around the world to earn safe and dignified livelihoods, exercise their fundamental labor rights and have a voice in shaping work conditions and public policies that impact their lives. Workers accomplish this by organizing and joining unions, through which they are able to negotiate collective improvements as well as build and balance power at the workplace and within the global economy.

Our professional staff of more than 300 work in over 60 countries with 400-plus labor unions and allied organizations to support workers—in garment factories, home service, seafood processing, mining, agriculture, informal marketplaces, manufacturing, the public sector and beyond—as they exercise their rights, including organizing for safer work sites, demanding living wages and improving laws (and the enforcement of existing laws) that protect working people, and fighting exploitation and abuse.

Solidarity Center Strategy

The Solidarity Center very deliberately designs and implements programs to:

  • Confront the gender discrimination that suppresses women’s voice at work and racism in all its forms—for both are deliberate tools to disenfranchise people
  • Provide workers–especially the most marginalized, such as domestic workers, street vendors, agriculture and migrant workers–with the information they need to understand their rights, raise the voices of the grassroots, and lead their own organizations to improve their jobs
  • Build global solidarity that connects people across borders, sharing strategies and providing peer support
  • Advance legal strategies to strengthen labor laws and human rights laws at the country, regional and global levels
  • Pursue alliances that help build enduring democratic societies, broadly collaborating with allies in the larger social justice movement to become stronger together

Hands-on Training and Individualized Support

The Solidarity Center works one-on-one with workers, and crafts programs to support the specific needs of unions, associations and workers.  For instance, we

  • Provide training and technical expertise that can help workers take on societal ills such as child labor, human trafficking, unfair labor laws, infringement of women’s rights, dangerous workplaces and the exploitation of the vulnerable
  • Assist unions trying to strengthen internal structures, including achievement of gender parity
  • Work with women as they challenge the systems and organizations that deny them voice
  • Conduct health and safety trainings for factory and other workers, and support networks of workers injured on the job
  • Implement legal assistance programs, including training paralegals, to help workers recover stolen wages or benefits illegally denied them
  • Connect migrant workers to protective networks, decreasing their vulnerability
  • Link workers and their unions with others sharing similar struggles and experiences
  • Boost advocacy efforts so that campaigns resonate beyond borders
  • Stand in solidarity with social-change activists around the world as we strive to build a global network of worker rights defenders

Publications

THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC AND WORKERS IN CAMBODIA

THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC AND WORKERS IN CAMBODIA

As a new wave of COVID-19 hits Cambodia, a new study recommends urgent action to ensure garment and tourism workers workers do not experience widespread loss of jobs and wages as they did in 2020. The Center for Policy Studies survey is supported by Solidarity Center...

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What Happens Underground Stays Underground

What Happens Underground Stays Underground

Women working in South Africa's mining sector report being subject to sexual and gender-based violence and  harassment, inside mines and within the mining communities where they live and efforts to redress such abuse must address the nature of the workplace and...

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Strawberry Global Supply Chains in Mexico

Strawberry Global Supply Chains in Mexico

The governments of Mexico and the United States have supported the growth of the Mexican berry sector by creating conditions for a cheap supply of labor and profit growth. Mexican field workers receive an estimated 12 cents per pound of strawberries sold in U.S....

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