Like many women in Mombasa, Kenya, Alice Mwadzi says for years she barely eked out a living. A lack of jobs in the port city for many means a constant struggle to survive—selling fruit on busy highways or hauling carts stacked with heavy water containers through...
The Solidarity Center joins with unions in Kenya and around the world in championing ratification of the ILO global treaty Convention 189 covering domestic worker rights. Credit: KUDHEIHA
Millions of domestic workers are employed in countries where they are excluded from national labor laws, including limits to working hours, minimum wage and overtime pay. Domestic workers, who are predominantly women and sometimes children, toil invisibly in private homes. Some live on their employer’s premises where, away from the public eye, they often are subject to abuse. Nearly one in five domestic workers are international migrants.
The Solidarity Center supports unions around the world as they assist domestic workers in gaining their rights on the job such as in Honduras and Ukraine, where workers formed the first domestic workers union in their countries with the assistance of Solidarity Center partners.
Together with the International Domestic Workers Federation (IDWF) and the U.S.-based National Domestic Workers Alliance, the Solidarity Center supports leadership, gender equality and rights-based training for domestic workers to strengthen their ability to advocate for improved wages and working conditions.
Many domestic workers migrate for jobs to the Gulf countries and the Middle East, and the Solidarity Center works to advance their rights with union partners in origin and destination countries, such as the Kuwait Trade Union Federation (KTUF), which launched a migrant worker office that assists domestic workers and other migrant workers experiencing wage theft and other forms of exploitation.
The Solidarity Center, which joined with unions and rights organizations in championing passage of the 2011 International Labor Organization’s global treaty (Convention 189) covering domestic worker rights, assists unions in pushing for adoption of the treaty in their countries to ensure domestic work is legally recognized and valued. The Solidarity Center also supports domestic worker unions achieve labor rights in countries such as Mexico, where union partners won the right to written contracts and a ban on employing workers younger than age 15.
U.S. Women Activists Connect with Kenyan Women Workers
Five black women activists representing the U.S. labor movement, the Black Women’s Roundtable and other causes working to promote women’s empowerment and gender equality, traveled to Kenya last week to connect with union women from the Central Organization of Trade...
Rosalie: A Champion for Migrant Domestic Worker Rights
Workers who migrate to other countries for jobs often do not know their rights when they arrive, and many, like domestic workers, toil in isolation, where they are easily exploited by employers. Rosalie Ewengue, a domestic worker in Morocco from the Democratic...
![Home-based Workers in the Export Garment Sector in Bangladesh: An Exploratory Study in Dhaka City (Wiego, 2012)](https://www.solidaritycenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Photo_Home-Based-Bangladesh1.jpg)
Home-based Workers in the Export Garment Sector in Bangladesh: An Exploratory Study in Dhaka City (Wiego, 2012)
Workers in the home-based export garment sector remain an invisible segment of the labor market, and this report is first step toward a systematic documentation of this phenomenon, with special emphasis on employment conditions, worker livelihoods and issues affecting...
![Legal and Policy Tools to Meet Informal Workers’ Demands: Lessons from India (WIEGO, 2012)](https://www.solidaritycenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Photo_Legal-and-Policy-Tool.jpg)
Legal and Policy Tools to Meet Informal Workers’ Demands: Lessons from India (WIEGO, 2012)
This report highlights key lessons from a WIEGO pilot project in India examining the nature of the informal economy and the way legal and policy tools can address the concerns of those working in the informal economy. This Solidarity Center report is part of a...
![Solidarity Center 2011 Annual Report](https://www.solidaritycenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Solidarity-Center-2011-Board-Report_13.jpg)
Solidarity Center 2011 Annual Report
Download here.
![Solidarity Center 2010 Annual Report](https://www.solidaritycenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/pubs_annual_report_2010.jpg)
Solidarity Center 2010 Annual Report
Download here.
![Core Labor Rights in Indonesia: A Survey of Violations in the Formal Sector (2010)](https://www.solidaritycenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/Indonesia.Core-Labor-Rights-in-Indonesia-cover.2010.jpg)
Core Labor Rights in Indonesia: A Survey of Violations in the Formal Sector (2010)
This survey of labor rights in Indonesia finds that although improvements have been made since the fall of the Suharto government, serious violations persist, including: discrimination against women in the workplace; anti-union discrimination by employers;...
![Degradation of Work: Oil and Casualization of Labor in the Niger Delta (2010)](https://www.solidaritycenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/pubs_nigeriareport2011.jpg)
Degradation of Work: Oil and Casualization of Labor in the Niger Delta (2010)
This report explores how the degradation of work in the oil-rich Niger Delta jeopardizes the livelihoods and well-being of workers and their families and results in fewer opportunities for Nigerians to improve working and living conditions, especially in local...