Dec 11, 2024
Thousands of teachers rallied in Pristina on December 5 to demand that the government meet with them to resolve longstanding poor work conditions and unfair compensation. For more than two years, Kosovo’s Ministry of Education has refused to meet with Kosovo teachers’ union SBASHK or implement a long-delayed collective agreement that will improve working conditions and provide a dignified pay raise.
“By opposing a collective contract, [the minister] is also opposing education workers. When there is no dialogue, there is no democracy,” said SBASHK President Rrahman Jasharaj.
Three collective contracts that were signed previously were never fully implemented. The most recent, signed in 2021, was invalidated by the Ministry of Education in November 2022 with a promise of new negotiations, which have yet to materialize.
Teachers gathered at the Education Ministry to present a raft of demands, which included that the government recognize the sacredness of teachers’ work in educating future generations and meet with them. Teachers subsequently moved the rally to the Kosovo Assembly to further advocate for education workers and the children under their care.
The government’s refusal to meet with them, say teachers, is a cynical dismissal of their sacrifices in keeping children in school during the bloody Kosovo war and the COVID pandemic, even while they have helped support colleagues, schools, children and their families through the mental health struggles and economic challenges caused by both events.
During the 1998-1999 Kosovo war, SBASHK played a vital role in preserving education services. Today SBASHK advocates for better working conditions and fair salaries, safer schools and professional growth opportunities for teachers. A five-week 2022 teachers’ strike for a living wage in response to COVID pandemic and Ukraine war-related inflation earned teachers a significant salary increase that has yet to be implemented. Meanwhile, regional economic challenges continue to threaten teachers’ and their students’ well-being. Recent economic analysis of the West Balkans shows that inflation in 2022 had surged to a two-decade high, with food and energy prices skyrocketing and eroding the purchasing power of households.
“It’s unfortunate that education workers, who are among the most important in any society, have to resort to a protest to prompt their government to engage with them,” says Solidarity Center Southeastern Europe Country Program Director Steven McCloud.
“A fair collective agreement with teachers is essential for ensuring the highest quality of education for students,” he said.
Dec 9, 2024
A four-year, regional, health care rights campaign led by the Organization of Trade Unions of West Africa (OTUWA) is expanding its success and influence in the region with Sierra Leone’s Finance Minister last month announcing a 2 percent increase in the country’s budget allocation for the health sector, from 7 percent in 2024 to 9 percent in 2025.
“The Sierra Leone Labor Congress appreciates the increase as a success of our health care campaign,” says OTUWA Executive Secretary John Odah, while noting that Sierra Leone’s government has not met the 15 percent minimum annual budgetary health allocation to which African heads of state agreed in the landmark 2001 Abuja Declaration.
Like many countries in the region, in the context of mounting national debt, multinational tax dodging and illicit financial flows, Sierra Leone’s government is struggling to provide essential services to its citizens, including accessible health care.
Sierra Leone’s health care funding increase builds on the success of OTUWA’s “Health Care Is a Human Right” campaign this year in Nigeria, where the federal government in April announced a disbursement of almost $70 million to bolster the country’s health infrastructure.
Given that more than 80 percent of West Africa’s working people earn their living in poorly paid and uncertain informal-sector jobs, lack of access to state-provided health care or health insurance is placing an unfair financial burden on low‐income individuals and households, say unions. A United Nations report noted that 381 million people, or almost 5 percent of the world’s population, were pushed into extreme poverty in 2019 by out-of-pocket health expenditures.
OTUWA’s health care rights campaign unites West Africa’s unions in a fight for equal and fair health care access for all. Campaign participants, which include OTUWA affiliates and national health care unions, have been advocating since 2020 for the protection of health worker rights and effective, accessible health care for all with national and continent-wide African Union legislators and policymakers, including the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) Parliament. An OTUWA survey of 700 health workers living in Gambia, Ghana, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone and Togo provided a window into the region’s health-sector shortcomings and presented a raft of recommendations that included increased funding for the health care sector across the region. This year, the campaign expanded its influence through an alliance with Public Services International, a global union federation that represents 30 million workers in 154 countries and, to preserve public resources, added good governance to its demands.
“We celebrate with our Sierra Leonean brothers and sisters and will continue to support unions that are demanding more investment by governments in the health of their citizens,” says Solidarity Center Africa Regional Program Director Christopher Johnson.
OTUWA represents trade union national centers in the 15 West African countries comprising ECOWAS. None of West Africa’s signatory governments–required by ECOWAS Fundamental Principles to promote and protect human rights in accordance with the African Union (AU) Charter on Human and People’s Rights, including provision of social protections such as health care–are implementing the 15 percent minimum annual budgetary health allocation.
Oct 31, 2024
In a legal attempt to transform traditional gender roles and relieve unequal care burdens on women, South Africa’s Constitutional Court this week is taking up a case challenging sections of the country’s employment act that permit four months of maternity leave to biological mothers only. By comparison, fathers are only entitled to a 10-day paternity leave. If affirmed, the case will transform how maternity and parental leave is granted in South Africa and set an important precedent for the entire continent.
“Although we do anticipate the Constitutional Court confirming the judgment,” says Ziona Tanzer, Solidarity Center law program counsel, “how it does so and what it says about gender, the redistribution of care work and feminist labor law will be significant.”
Based on constitutional rights of non-discrimination and dignity, the Gauteng High Court in Johannesburg ruled last year that working parents must both have the right to time off after the birth of a baby or adopting a child, and can share four months of paid maternity leave made available to women under the Basic Conditions of Employment Act (BCEA). The High Court judge recognized that current provisions of the law do not permit families to autonomously determine who performs infant care work or equally share responsibilities between parents.
Although the High Court issued an interim order, the judgment must be affirmed by the Constitutional Court–a necessary requirement for all cases concerning the constitutionality of laws. The Constitutional Court could make the lower court’s order of unconstitutionality immediately applicable, which means the law will change from the date of the judgment, or it can give the South African legislature one or two years to amend the law.
The lower court also found that provisions in the BCEA unfairly and unconstitutionally discriminate against fathers and parents of children adopted or born via surrogacy. Pointing to an unequal care burden on women, the presiding judge said that although it is not discriminatory to grant leave to a birth mother, the real question underlying the act is a policy choice with respect to child nurture, which could be done by either parent.
Bringing international and comparative law–which is increasingly recognizing the common responsibility and rights of both parents to contribute to the raising of children–to the court, South Africa-based Labor Research Services, the Solidarity Center, the Solidarity Center’s International Lawyers Assisting Workers (ILAW) Network and the University of Pretoria’s Center for Human Rights together submitted “friends of the court,” or amici arguments. The amicus arguments focus on the gendered underpinnings of the BCEA. In its premise that mothers are primarily responsible for child care while fathers’ care responsibilities are secondary, the BCEA not only forces an unequal care burden on mothers, it also unfairly and unconstitutionally discriminates against fathers and non-traditional families, such as parents of adopted children or those born via surrogacy. The attorney representing the amicus is ILAW member Kayan Leung, from Lawyers for Human Rights.
Paid leave for fathers in many African countries remains below three weeks; some only allow for a few days.
The ILAW Network is a membership organization for union and worker rights’ lawyers. Its core mission is to bring together legal practitioners and scholars in an exchange of ideas and information to best represent the rights and interests of workers and their organizations.
Oct 10, 2024
With disability rights organization New Age foundation, the Solidarity Center supported the re-launch of job search mobile phone app, “Ten Ishte” for people with disabilities in Kyrgyzstan. The app, which translated means “Equal Work,” was previously informational but now also lists inclusive job openings and accessibility information about the buildings in which those jobs are located.
“Everybody deserves the dignity of full participation in society, including opportunities to acquire jobs-based skills and earn their livelihoods,” says New Age founder and long-term Solidarity Center partner Askar Turdugulov.
In collaboration with experts and civil society organizations and with Solidarity Center support, New Age helped redesign the app to best serve the needs of people with disabilities who are living in Kyrgyzstan. The app’s launch in Bishkek on October 3, gathered key rights activists and political and business leaders, including people with disabilities, civil society organization leaders, employers, Deputy Minister of Labor Kyial Januzakova, Deputy Minister of Education Muratbek Kasymaliev, Bishkek Deputy Mayor Victoria Mozgacheva and key members of parliament.
Event feedback included a recommendation by public association ARDI lawyer Seinep Dyikanbaevato to report the app’s building accessibility ratings to the Bishkek mayor’s office.
A public signing of a Solidarity Center memorandum of understanding during the event, which for the first time also included the Kyrgyz Society of the Blind and Deaf, marks the expansion of a disability rights coalition that, through better access to good jobs, seeks better social and professional integration for people with disabilities in Kyrgyzstan.
Sep 4, 2024
In a significant win for equity on Firestone Liberia’s rubber plantation in Harbel, more than 90 percent of contract workers voted Saturday to join the Firestone Agricultural Workers’ Union of Liberia (FAWUL). With 1,660 votes for FAWUL representation, contract workers won the right to negotiate collectively with the employer for, they hope, the same wages and benefits currently enjoyed by directly employed workers who are already represented by FAWUL.
“We owe it to generation after generation of workers who have suffered to secure good jobs and dignity for ALL,” says FAWUL Chairperson Rodennick Bongorlee.
FAWUL’s organizing success is the result of the union’s long-term campaign for equity for Firestone’s contracted workers, whose precarious jobs and low wages, often for the same work as permanent employees, are in stark contrast to hard-won worker rights on the rubber plantation.
A 2008 collective bargaining agreement (CBA) and subsequent agreements were key for workers and labor rights in Liberia, where Firestone is the country’s largest employer. Previous to these agreements, plantation workers had endured working conditions that a 2005 human rights lawsuit against the company described as,”forced labor, the modern equivalent of slavery,” where exploitative quotas resulted in excessive hard labor and children working alongside their parents in lieu of attending school. However, through a series of agreements with the company since 2008, FAWUL won for directly employed workers improved conditions that include reduced quotas, better working conditions and compensation, on-site free schooling for workers’ children, a free onsite health clinic and somewhat improved housing.
But, after 15 years of partnership with agricultural workers on the plantation, the company is increasingly backtracking. By FAWUL’s calculations, since 2019, some 3,500 full-time jobs have been lost to Firestone-imposed transfers to contract positions, lay-offs and forced retirements. In 2019, Firestone fired up to 2,000 employees and required them to sign contracts with “labor contractors,” who in turn hired the former employees to perform the same work under Firestone Liberia’s supervision, but at significantly lower rates of pay, with no benefits and without the protections provided by FAWUL’s CBA.
Without collective voice and effective representation through a union, contract workers have been subject to safety risks and exploitation. Although all plantation workers face grave dangers to their health and safety, low-wage contract workers cannot afford personal protective equipment such as boots, gloves and glasses and are at increased risk related to acid use and snake bite exposure. And inadequate company housing for contract workers—usually a small, two-room brick apartment that houses 15–20 people from two extended families—is exposing contract workers and their families to unsafe crowding and, some workers report, rat infestation.
And, without CBA protection, contracted workers complain of economic exploitation. Contract tappers last month were describing Firestone Liberia’s measurement process for reimbursing latex extraction as “cheating,” and said they are being forced to work excessive overtime regularly without commensurate pay or, sometimes, any pay at all. Contract cup washers, most of whom are women who walk more than an hour to work, say they too are forced to work excessive hours without fair or, sometimes, any compensation. Excessive hours are enforced by threat of discipline or dismissal contract workers told the Solidarity Center—a very serious threat for those trapped in debt bondage to the company.
“We applaud the courage and spirit of the Firestone plantation workers who have steadfastly fought for a union to improve their lives and working conditions,” says Solidarity Center Executive Director Shawna Bader-Blau.
FAWUL in 2007 was awarded the AFL-CIO’s annual George Meany-Lane Kirkland Human Rights Award in recognition of the union’s “extraordinary courage” in successfully organizing more than 4,000 Firestone Liberia workers for the first time in the company’s 82-year existence in the country. An indirect subsidiary of Bridgestone Americas Inc., Firestone Liberia is the largest contiguous natural-rubber producing operation in the world. The company supplies Bridgestone with raw and block latex with which to manufacture tires in the United States. Approximately 25,000 people reside on the Firestone-Liberia plantation, including roughly 8,500 workers with their families. Because Firestone Liberia is an employment-standards trendsetter, plantation wages and working conditions have a direct impact on the livelihoods, rights and dignity of all workers in Liberia.
The Solidarity Center, in partnership with the United Steelworkers (USW), works with Liberian unions in key extractive industries such as mining, timber and rubber, as well as with domestic workers, to support them as they better serve their members and assist workers in forming unions.
