App-based drivers worldwide work long hours for often minimum wages while facing safety risks every day—and these issues are compounded for women platform workers, according to speakers at a Commission on the Status of Women (#CSW67) side event, Women Workers...
The Solidarity Center engages with unions and their allies through an analysis and practice of equality, radical inclusion and intersectionality that is explicitly feminist, anti-racist, pro-equality, pro-worker, pro-migrant and class conscious.
The Solidarity Center designs and implements strategies to confront the multiple and intersecting forms of oppression that contribute to economic structures in which women and other groups of workers are devalued and excluded from economic and social equality. This requires a conscious effort to examine how oppressive forces play out throughout the global labor movement with a commitment to dismantle these systems. Explicit in this work is the understanding that the agency and leadership of the most marginalized workers are key components of decent work and economic justice for all.
The Solidarity Center has assisted unions and their allies in countries such as Cambodia, Colombia, Georgia, Honduras, Indonesia, Kyrgyzstan, Morocco, Nigeria, Nicaragua, South Africa and Tunisia to ensure meaningful participation of historically excluded and marginalized workers in unions and other democratic structures.
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In Morocco, the Solidarity Center supported a multi-year effort to build women worker power and gender equality which led to the inclusion of women workers during negotiations for the first collective bargaining agreement in the informal agriculture sector. In Colombia, the Solidarity Center supported the development of the first national organization dedicated to improving the working conditions of Afro-Colombians.
In Kyrgyzstan, Morocco and Tunisia, Solidarity Center is assisting in strengthening union efforts to promote inclusion of individuals with disabilities. In Nicaragua, Solidarity Center supports domestic workers as they address inclusion of LGBTQI union members to ensure they can represent themselves, articulate their priorities and increase their leadership opportunities and visibility.
The Solidarity Center:
- Conducts research and awareness-raising to challenge systems of oppression and inform inclusive approaches to building worker power across social identities at all levels
- Supports representative, inclusive leadership in our partner organizations
- Engages in cross-movement work to combat tools of oppression that impact women, including gender-based violence and harassment at work
- Brings together unions and community groups to identify shared socioeconomic struggles, analyzes how those struggles are linked to systemic racism and implements organizing, legal and advocacy strategies to collectively overcome the oppression that entraps workers in poverty
- Advocates for economic policies that uproot systemic discrimination and exploitation in labor markets.
Black Women Workers Connecting Globally to Advance Racial, Gender Justice
Discrimination, marginalization and powerful political forces like authoritarianism do not stop at a country’s border—and that is why it is so important for black women worldwide connect through their unions and allied organizations, panelists said Thursday at...
High-Level, Global Initiative: Worker Rights Fundamental to Democracy
In a powerful demonstration of support for strengthening worker rights to ensure thriving democracies and prosperous economies, representatives from governments, unions and philanthropic organizations met in Washington, D.C., yesterday to renew their commitment...
Putting Union Gender Equality Policy into Practice in South Africa
Unions are key drivers advancing gender equality. Yet in many countries around the world, there is a disconnect between labor union policy and practice in transforming gender inequalities within trade unions. Through the lens of the South African union movement, this...
Annual Report 2014
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Labor Migration and Inclusive Growth: Toward Creating Employment in Origin Communities (2015)
This paper investigates the intersection of labor migration and the inclusive growth agenda, and seeks to recommend policies so governments of origin countries can, in part, expand labor migration’s positive impacts by making migrant workers agents in promoting and...
Roles for Workers and Unions in Regulating Labor Recruitment in Mexico (2015)
Fordham University law professor Jennifer Gordon examines the roles of guest workers as organizers, monitors and policy-setters in supply chain initiatives and other efforts to address labor recruitment violations. Download here.
International Labor Migration: Re-regulating the Private Power of Labor Brokers (2015)
In this review of initiatives to regulate labor brokers, the authors find that state and civil society efforts to address migrant worker exploitation point to potential new policies, most effectively led by state-backed regulatory frameworks. Download here.
Irreconciliable Differences? Pursuing the Capabilities Approach within the Global Governance of Migration (2014)
This report on global labor migration challenges the current “triple win” paradigm in global migration policy through a worker rights lens, and argues that when applying the now-accepted "capabilities" approach, the international development community must focus on...