Credit: Kay Chernush
Millions of children are not in school today because they are forced to work. Children as young as 5 years old are part of the global workforce. In factories and in fields, children work up to 15 hours a day, seven days a week.
The Solidarity Center partners with unions around the world that are championing and negotiating economic benefits in the workplace which often enable adult workers to support their families without sending their children to work. Through collective bargaining with employers, unions also can bargain for worker access to schools or daycare facilities.
The Solidarity Center also joins with advocacy partners like the Child Labor Coalition and Global March Against Child Labor to champion legal and regulatory means to end child labor and with human rights organizations to address the structural conditions that lead to child labor. For instance, together with coalition partners in the Cotton Campaign, the Solidarity Center worked for an end to child labor in Uzbekistan’s cotton fields where government-run cotton harvests have forced citizens of all ages to toil each fall.
Women workers made important gains under Iraq’s new labor law, the country’s first ever to prohibit sexual harassment at the workplace. The law clearly defines sexual harassment and specifies penalties for perpetrators. Women union activists led their unions in...
Equitable and decent work for all and strategies such as promoting collective action, trade unionism and other worker rights are essential to achieve worker well-being, according to a report by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) released today. “People are...
Today, Universal Children’s Day, is a good time to remind people that more than 168 million children around the world are forced to work nearly every day. https://youtu.be/lrAvjphqVLk Global March against Child Labor, a coalition of organizations working to end child...
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This JustJobs and Solidarity Center report asserts that post-earthquake Nepal is at a unique moment when it can leverage the reconstruction process to protect worker rights and ensure that migration out of the country for work is a choice, not a necessity....
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Although Sri Lanka's labor code sets the minimum wage, the maximum number of work hours per day and work days per week, and establishes rules around overtime and benefits, many employers in Jaffna, the country’s northern province, are flaunting the statutes. The vast...
Wage theft is widespread throughout the the public- and private-sectors, with Zimbabweans working months without a paycheck. Based on surveys at 442 companies, the report documents the vast scope of wage theft; outlines the responsibilities of the state under...
Convening experts from the AFL-CIO, the Rutgers University Center for Women’s Global Leadership and the Solidarity Center, this report examines how to shift governments' policy priorities, create an enabling environment for social organizing and transform women’s...
