Globalization has enabled corporations and governments to weaken rights protections and erode decent work around the world–to the detriment of workers and their ability to feed their families, enjoy safe workplaces and have a say in policies that affect their lives. This imbalance drives inequality and exploitation, across borders and along supply chains. And it is fueled by corporate legal strategies that codify and legitimatize the disenfranchisement of working people everywhere.
Because the legal menace to workers is global, the Solidarity Center is meeting the challenge with a global response.
Today, the Solidarity Center launches the only global network of union and worker rights lawyers and advocates, International Lawyers Assisting Workers (ILAW). By uniting legal practitioners and scholars, ILAW will increase effective representation of workers’ interests across jurisdictions and economic sectors; promote the exchange of information and ideas; and provide a venue for the diffusion of successful legal strategies to help turn back regressive developments that harm the interests of workers.
“Globally, the rules governing workers—including who can be categorized as workers—and their organizations are being contested. We founded the ILAW Network to organize lawyers and advocates to help ensure that new global rules are written for workers, not employers,” says Jeffrey Vogt, Solidarity Center Rule of Law director and ILAW board chair.
Designed to the hub for worker rights lawyers across the world, ILAW will facilitate new, innovative litigation, including transnational supply chain litigation and help spread the adoption of pro-worker legislation and defeat anti-worker laws. It will focus on corporate accountability in supply chains, migrant and informal worker rights, discrimination in all its forms, transnational collective bargaining, and workers’ right to exercise collective, trade union rights. The ILAW Network is supported by an advisory board, comprised of 20 lawyers from 20 countries, with expertise on a broad range of legal matters.
“We see this network as an intellectual bulwark against employer and government attacks on workers worldwide,” Vogt says.
ILAW is a membership network. Lawyers and legal advocates who support workers and/or their organizations, are urged to join here. ILAW can be followed on Twitter at @ILAW_Network.
Seeking a job to support her family but lacking opportunity in her native Bangladesh, Shahida became a domestic worker far from her home. Beyond duties in her employer’s home, she was forced to work at the houses of several of his relatives, giving her little time to sleep. Shahida was provided stale leftovers for her meals. She faced harassment and abuse from many quarters.
“They misbehaved with me a lot… This was often accompanied by physical abuse,” says Shahida. (See video.)
More than 50 percent of female migrant workers in Bangladesh are employed as domestic workers. Isolated in private homes, they often are targets of violence and abuse because they are women. And as migrant workers, they often face exploitation across the migration experience—from labor recruiters, transport workers, border guards, employers and legal systems that protect employers over workers.
Yet joining with other migrant domestic workers through the Bangladesh Obivashi Mohila Sramik Association (BOMSA), Shahida is now among women demanding gender justice on their jobs, in their communities and at the global level, where they are championing an International Labor Organization standard on gender-based violence at work.
The Solidarity Center is partnering with BOMSA to promote fair migration through awareness-raising, policy reform and improved access to justice under the global labor program supported by the USAID.
By engaging in collective action, Shahida says, “now, we feel empowered.
The U.S.-based Amalgamated Bank has selected the Solidarity Center as one of its featured nonprofits in an online contest. The organization that receives the most votes will receive up to $5,000 and be recognized as a prominent social justice organization making change for workers.
The Amalgamated Bank campaign is part of “#GivingTuesday,” an annual event that takes place on the Tuesday following Thanksgiving. Amalgamated Bank’s contest is designed to encourage bank customers and others to give to organizations that inspire them and raise awareness about social-justice groups that deserve support. The Amalgamated Bank #VoteToGive contest is open anyone in the United States.
#VoteToGive!
Amalgamated Bank is the largest union-owned bank and one of the only unionized banks in the United States. Founded in 1923 by the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, Amalgamated Bank today is a leading philanthropic organization for social change and worker justice. The contest goes out to the broader labor, pro-labor and progressive community including Amalgamate’s clients as well, and has the potential to introduce us to many unions and allies in the United States.
If you are on social media, please retweet and “like” and on Twitter, and like and share our Facebook posts to help spread the word. Use the hashtag #VoteToGive.
On November 25, the Solidarity Center joins our allies around the world in launching 16 Days of Activism against Gender-Based Violence. This event highlights the need to end violence against women and girls around the world and pass a global standard to address the full scope of gender-based violence at work.
Solidarity Center Gender Specialist Robin Runge
Solidarity Center’s Senior Gender Specialist Robin Runge discusses gender-based violence at work and how unions and our allies are working for passage of a global standard that would address this prevalent, and generally unacknowledged, workers rights violation.
Q.: What is gender-based violence at work?
Robin Runge: Gender-based violence at work, importantly, is being defined by workers around the world and the International Labor Organization (ILO) through the standard-setting process: It is violence and harassment directed at persons because of their sex or gender. This definition is intentionally broad to recognize that people experience a range of behaviors based on their perceived or actual gender or sexual identity. Gender-based violence at work is inclusive of sexual harassment. A classic example of sexual harassment at work is a supervisor or a manager demanding sex from someone who works for them in exchange for keeping their job or for a promotion. This is also a form of gender-based violence and harassment at work. Similarly, a supervisor harassing or physically abusing a male worker who is perceived to be acting female or to be gay. Gender-based violence at work also includes the impact of domestic violence on the workplace. The majority of workers who experience gender-based violence at work are women because of social and economic inequality, which makes women more vulnerable to these forms of abuse and harassment. However, men also experience gender-based violence and harassment at work.
Q.: Why is gender-based violence and harassment at work a worker rights issue?
RR: Gender-based violence and harassment is one of the most insidious and pervasive worker rights violations. In fact, it is impossible to achieve other worker rights goals such as gender equality, and safe and decent work, if we don’t address gender-based violence. Gender-based violence and harassment at work prevents all workers from being able to assert their rights to freedom of association and speech in the workplace and to take part in collective action about wages and working conditions.
We know that the rates of gender-based violence, although they vary from sector to sector, are extraordinarily high. So for example, we know that in Cambodia, beer promoters, who are mostly women, more than 80 percent of them have been sexually harassed on the job. In many sectors, especially where women are the majority of workers, including the garment sector, and the service industry, the majority of workers report experiencing forms of gender-based violence and harassment. Something that impacts the majority of the workers in a particular sector is a core labor and union issue.
Q.: What’s being done to address gender-based violence and harassment at work?
RR: Workers, including domestic workers, precarious workers, part-time workers, street vendors and the unions that represent them began advocating for a global standard to end gender-based violence in the world of work in 2013. Workers know from their experiences that a global ILO standard applies to all industries and all countries around the world, thereby ensuring that workers throughout the supply chain benefit from the same protections. Over several years of a global campaign, led by the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC)—and we at the Solidarity Center were a huge part of this effort—workers and unions were successful in having the ILO place a discussion about the need for a standard to end gender-based violence in world of work on their agenda.
In June 2018, at the annual International Labor Conference, the first negotiations took place among workers, governments and employers on a standard to end violence and harassment in the world of work. The second and final set of negotiations will take place in June 2019.
Q.: How have unions led in efforts to end gender-based violence and harassment at work?
RR: Unions really have been the catalyst for change in this area. And the Solidarity Center has played a critical role in helping and supporting unions in leveraging their collective power to achieve this. Gender-based violence is hidden. As individuals who experience this, women are socially and culturally trained not to speak of it. Women are also often afraid that if they speak about it, they will be be retaliated against, including more physical abuse or sexual abuse. Since many people who experience gender-based violence and harassment don’t speak about it, it’s as if it’s not happening. Moreover, workplace structures can create environments that permit and perpetuate these abuses. Workers coming together in unions and other collective worker action provides a mechanism whereby workers can overcome these barriers to preventing and addressing gender-based violence and harassment at work.
Q.: What can unions and their allies do to ensure ratification of the ILO standard?
RR: We’re in the middle of the two-year standard-setting process during which the ILO has provided opportunities for governments, employers and worker rights organizations to submit comments on draft language and participate in negotiations at standard setting meetings in June 2018 and June 2019. The Solidarity Center has supported our union partners, encouraging them to participate in this process and thereby ensuring that the voices of workers are driving the content of the standard. In particular, participation of our partners has led to the development of definitions of violence and harassment, gender-based violence, “world of work,” and worker that are broad and inclusive of all workers’ experiences, including women workers in precarious, part-time and informal work.
In Colombia, the national union of food workers, SINTRAIMAGRA, is denouncing the murder of one of its union leaders and is asking the government to identify, capture and prosecute those who perpetrated the crime.
Shortly before he died, Edilberto Niño Cristancho told authorities he was stabbed 18 times by two assailants as he boarded a taxi November 4 in Villavicencio.
Colombian palm oil union leader Edilberto Nicon Cristancho was murdered this month, one of more than a dozen union leaders killed this year. Credit: SINTRAIMAGRA
Niño Cristancho was leading an organizing and formalization campaign for palm oil workers in the country’s fertile eastern plains together with the Central Unitaria de Trabajadores (CUT).
Palm oil workers in Colombia and around the world are part of a global supply chain that often exploits human labor to feed the world’s growing demand for household products and cosmetics. Palm oil workers are forced to work long hours in hazardous conditions, without adequate safety equipment and unprotected from contact with chemicals like paraquat, an acutely toxic chemical.
With CUT, Niño Cristancho sought to ensure palm companies in the region fully complied with workers’ constitutional and legal rights, as well as with International Labor Organization conventions, such as the right to form unions and bargain contracts.
For decades, Colombia was the most dangerous country for union leaders and members, with thousands of activists murdered over the past 20 years, and it remains among the five worst countries for worker rights, according to the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) 2018 Global Rights Index. Perpetrators of murders and attacks are rarely punished.
Although Colombia’s overall homicide rate dropped after a 2016 peace agreement between the government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), worker rights activists are now facing a worsening security environment. Between January 1 and August 27, 14 union members were murdered, six were physically attacked and 134 threatened with violence, according to the Escuela Nacional Sindica Information Database of Human Rights.
Social activists, indigenous leaders and environmentalists also are being murdered in greater numbers. Nearly 200 community leaders were killed in 2018.
Unions are concerned that recent statements by the government linking social protests to armed groups encourages violence, and SINTRAIMAGRA is asking the government to provide security guarantees to union members and union leaders.
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