The Solidarity Center strives for rights for people on the move by ensuring migrant workers are fully able to exercise their workplace, social, economic and democratic rights. Solidarity Center/Jeanne Hallacy
Labor migration feeds the global economy. Hundreds of millions of migrant workers worldwide generate billions of dollars in global remittances. They are domestic workers, construction and agricultural workers, factory and service workers, teachers and professionals. Migrant workers often travel long distances due to a lack of decent work at home to support their families and build a better life. They frequently are denied the most basic human rights. For instance, most destination countries deny migrant workers the right to form unions, and explicitly exclude them from labor law protections, and women migrant workers are often subject to gender-based violence and harassment in their workplaces.
The Solidarity Center strives for worker rights for people on the move by ensuring migrant worker rights are a key part of the labor movement. We cultivate an understanding of how exploitative labor migration management schemes are a widespread means by which to undercut worker wages, create precarious work and pit workers against each other. And, in addressing these structural ills, we emphasize a response that understands the intersectionalities and identities that make migrant workers especially vulnerable. Our goal is to ensure that migrant workers are fully able to exercise their workplace rights, as well as their social, economic and democratic rights.
We also focus on the creation of decent work in home countries so workers can migrate by choice and not due to economic coercion. We recognize that migration is not caused by a single factor that “pushes” workers to migrate. In doing so, we bring our unique worker rights voice more broadly by emphasizing that everyone deserves dignity at work regardless of status—climate migrants, economic migrants and conflict refugees. We work to achieve this through programs that focus on union organizing and collective bargaining, policy advocacy, access to justice, safe migration and, more broadly, the ability to exercise fundamental freedoms as democratic participants.
Freedoms on the Move, a 2019 report by Solidarity Center and CIVICUS, is an urgent call to action for unions and other civil society groups to include migrant workers and refugees in advancing civic rights.
An estimated 200,000 Burmese migrants fuel Thailand’s huge fishing industry in Samut Sakhon province, an hour outside of Bangkok. The majority of workers are ethnic Mon from farming villages in southern Burma and they send their salaries to their families back home....
In Mombasa, Kenya, a labor broker offered Frank Wetindi a job in Dubai as a driver. Wetindi went into debt to pay the broker, but was given a job unloading planes in brutal heat, for a salary far less than he was promised. Living with eight men crammed in one room,...
Protecting the rights of migrant workers must be an essential component of the United Nations Global Compact on Safe, Regular and Orderly Migration, according to union leaders who met recently in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, to craft a worker rights agenda for inclusion...
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.
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...
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Earl V. Brown, Jr. & Kyle A. deCant Solidarity Center Labor and Employment Counsel Earl Brown and co-author Kyle deCant examine the legal issues surrounding the growing numbers of China's industrial interns, the latest class of “cheap” labor to be deployed in...
A unique grassroots coalition based in the Niger Delta, working with unions and other local non-governmental organizations, is providing a platform for women and young people to effectively engage in the democratic political process, hold local lawmakers accountable...