The Solidarity Center supports several worker community centers (WCCs), where workers and community members come together to learn about their rights and build collective power to claim them, train to become effective advocates for critical health and education services, and positively engage in the civic and economic life of their communities.

The Solidarity Center also provides legal assistance to workers in Bangladesh’s export-processing zones (EPZ) to assist them in defending their rights. By law, EPZ workers are denied the right to freely form and join a union, in violation of international labor standards.

As extreme heat and rising sea levels make employment in key industries, including the garment sector, more hazardous, it is critical for unions to have a say in how industry adapts to climate change. The Solidarity Center supports union partners to conduct research and advance worker-centered adaptation to the climate crisis, and facilitates cross-movement coalition building between labor and environmental advocates. In Bangladesh’s leather tannery sector, the Solidarity Center provides capacity building support to a sectoral union to shed light on occupational health and safety hazards tied to environmental degradation.

Although collective bargaining remains extremely difficult in Bangladesh, and often provokes employer retribution, unions are negotiating groundbreaking, gender-responsive collective bargaining agreements to improve wages and working conditions, with support from the Solidarity Center. The Solidarity Center also has trained thousands of workers on fire and building safety since the Tazreen Fashion and Rana Plaza disasters in 2012 and 2013, respectively, in which more than 1,200 garment workers lost their lives.