The International Domestic Workers Federation (IDWF) is urging more than 25 Africa-based affiliates to use the results of a new survey documenting the suffering of Africa’s domestic workers and their dependents during the pandemic to lobby their governments for urgent...
Some 2 billion people work in the informal sector as domestic workers, taxi drivers, and street vendors, many of them women workers. Informal economy work now comprises the majority of jobs in many countries and is increasing worldwide. Although informal economy workers can create up to half of a country’s gross national product, most have no access to health care, sick leave or support when they lose their jobs, and they have little power to advocate for living wages and safe and secure work.
The Solidarity Center is part of a broad-based movement in dozens of countries to help workers in the informal economy come together to assert their rights and raise living standards. For instance, three affiliates of the Central Organization of Trade Unions-Kenya (COTU-K), a Solidarity Center partner, signed agreements with informal worker associations to unionize the workers, enabling them to access to the country’s legal protections for formal-sector employees.
Find out more about informal workers gaining power by joining together in unions and worker associations in this Solidarity Center-supported publication, Informal Workers and Collective Action: A Global Perspective.
Podcast: Domestic Workers: Leading, Growing, THRIVING
Domestic workers are among the most invisible workers in the world—yet in Latin America, they are joining together to champion their rights at their workplace and in their communities, says Adriana Paz Ramirez on this week’s episode of The Solidarity Center Podcast....
Podcast: LGBTQ+ Domestic Workers Win Rights with Their Union
As a trans domestic worker from Nicaragua working in Guatemala, Francia Blanco says her experiences with verbal and physical abuse, discrimination, and forced labor conditions led her to take action to build a world where trans domestic workers had rights, respect and...
Informal Workers’ Organizing (WIEGO, 2013)
In overviewing self-organizing among such informal economy workers as waste pickers, domestic workers and construction workers, this report finds the lines are increasingly blurred between jobs in the formal and informal economies. This Solidarity Center report is...
Trade Unions Organizing Workers “Informalized from Above”: Case Studies from Cambodia, Colombia, South Africa and Tunisia (Rutgers, 2013)
Four case studies examine successful union organizing among workers whose jobs have been privatized, outsourced or contracted out. This Solidarity Center report is part of a multiyear research project, funded by the U.S. Agency forInternational Development, to study...
Informal Workers and Collective Bargaining: Case Studies from India, Georgia, Brazil, Liberia and Uruguay (WIEGO, 2013)
This report details a set of case studies on collective bargaining by informal workers in four different countries: Waste pickers in Minas Gerais state in Brazil, beedi workers in India, Georgia minibus taxi workers and street vendors in Monrovia, Liberia. The study...
SRI LANKA: Migrants Gain Voice and Protections (2013)
The Migrant Services Center, a Solidarity Center partner, is assisting migrant workers and their families in Sri Lanka while championing structural change through legislative and governmental processes, and offers a model for other labor and worker rights...
DOMESTIC WORKERS: Winning Recognition and Protection (2013)
Many domestic workers around the world are vulnerable to exploitation and not recognized by national labor laws. But in the Dominican Republic, domestic workers have campaigned to make gains over the last two decades—and a new Solidarity Center report shows how....
Solidarity Center 2012 Annual Report
Download here.