Anti-slavery certification schemes, accolades and awards are hardly reliable indicators for the public when choosing between companies, according to Neha Mira, a trafficking expert with the U.S.-based workers’ rights charity Solidarity Center. “The same time as you’re giving a gold star to a company, they’re firing workers for trying to organize in the workplace … or women for getting pregnant at work,” she said.
Unions, employers and governments are recognizing that eradicating gender-based violence at work is necessary to achieve the safe and dignified workplaces we all want and deserve. We need to ensure that women’s voices remain at the center of these efforts to avoid repeating what we have already seen—laws, policies and enforcement that have been ineffective and have allowed the women to be targets, writes the Solidarity Center’s Robin Runge.
“Today’s global supply chains contain large quantities of temporary and contract labor. There is virtually no legal accountability for lead firms when it comes to human rights, as they subcontract out the vast majority of the work – and their responsibility,” says Shawna Bader-Blau, Solidarity Center executive director.
“People coming together undoing those legacies of disenfranchisement, feudalism and slavery to create real voice and power: That is what we see when we see agricultural workers coming together,” says Shawna Bader-Blau, Solidarity Center executive director [Starting minute 5:00], in this podcast interview.
David Welsh, director for Southeast Asia at the Solidarity Center, a U.S.-based labor rights organization, says that large textile companies do not prioritize their employees. “Brands control and look for a specific market dynamic and it is a deliberately exploitative system,” he says.
“The trauma experienced by working families at the peak of the insurgency is yet to be comprehensively addressed,” the Solidarity Center said in an 8-page document released in Abuja on Tuesday. The Solidarity Center, a Washington-based organization, collaborated with the Nigeria Labor Congress (NLC) to carry out a comprehensive survey on the plight of workers in northeast Nigeria.