Through our Rule of Law Department, we partner with workers and unions around the world to ensure that all working people have their rights protected under domestic, regional and international law, have access to effective legal remedies at all levels if those rights are violated and have essential legal tools they need at the bargaining table.
Workers face significant challenges to overcoming systemic obstacles to exercise their rights, to access labor justice and to hold governments or corporations accountable in their workplaces and throughout their global supply chains.
By connecting workers and unions with lawyers from our International Lawyers Assisting Workers (ILAW) Network, we are able to harness both worker power and legal support where needed to create enabling environments and ensure workers are able to fully exercise their rights.
In South Africa, we supported constitutional litigation to ensure domestic workers have access to the national workers compensation fund. In Bangladesh, our lawyers supported workers in challenging the use of false criminal charges to dismiss and silence workers in garment factories. In the Americas, we supported efforts in regional human rights courts to hold governments accountable for anti-union violence.
The ILAW Network is a public service project led by our Rule of Law staff made up of more than 1,300 pro-worker lawyers in 96 countries, primarily from the Global South. It is the largest membership organization of worker and labor rights lawyers in the world.
The ILAW Network lawyers work together to develop creative solutions to promote workers’ rights globally—through campaigns, policy analysis, litigation and legislation.
From engaging with major fashion brands and suppliers to end gender-based violence and harassment in garment factories to suing major technology companies to secure labor rights on digital platforms, the ILAW Network holds governments and corporations accountable.
Work is driven with an explicit intersectional approach that incorporates three areas of legal tools:
Launched in 2022, the ILAW Network’s Strategic Litigation Fund makes modest grants to ILAW lawyer members to support impact litigation to defend legal principles and protect worker rights as human rights.
The Strategic Litigation Fund is the only dedicated financial resource for strategic litigation concerning workers’ rights in the world.
The ILAW Network has awarded 24 impact grants ranging from $3,000 to $20,000 driving change in Albania, Brazil, Ecuador, Eswatini, Ethiopia, Germany, India, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Nepal, Nigeria, Pakistan, Peru, South Africa, Switzerland, and Zimbabwe.
From challenging discriminatory exclusion of domestic workers from social protection in several African countries to seeking to enforce legislation against forced labor and human trafficking in Nepal to driving transnational supply chain litigation seeking to ensure accountability of a multi-national corporations, the Strategic Litigation Fund provides much-needed resources to push for long-term system change through legal reform.
Every donation, big or small, to the Strategic Litigation Fund can make a difference.
With just $1,500 we were able to send an investigative team of worker rights lawyers to conduct interviews with the families of victims’, indigenous communities and survivors of the Brumadinho dam collapse in Brazil where over 270 people died. The testimonies gathered and findings from the investigation were instrumental in driving the litigation to hold multinational corporations that certified the dam as safe accountable. As a result, the Brazilian company agreed to pay compensation (moral damages) in the amount of $7bn to the families of the victims.
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The following resources and opportunities to build power through regional and global convenings are at the heart of creating a movement alongside workers through a uniquely equipped legal community.
In a legal attempt to transform traditional gender roles and relieve unequal care burdens on women, South Africa's Constitutional Court this week is taking up a case challenging sections of the country's employment act that permit four months of maternity leave to...
More than 200 International Lawyers Assisting Workers Network (ILAW) members gathered in Casablanca, Morocco, October 9 to 11 at their 2024 Global Conference to share ideas and to collaborate on legal strategies to promote and defend worker rights. The Solidarity...
In a precedent-setting case before the International Court of Justice, the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) provided written comments last week in a legal dispute over the right to strike. The dispute, filed in 2023, is the first submitted by the United...
Read the full report here.
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In Cambodia, workers health and safety and climate change are linked. This report details the results of surveys, interviews, and thermal monitoring conducted in the garment, delivery, and informal food sector that display the negative effect that heat has on workers,...
In 2023, the Solidarity Center supported workers as they took on exploitative multinational companies and robot algorithms, demanded their governments tackle social ills and deliver on promises, and fought for justice in environments increasingly dangerous to those...
In South Africa, 98 percent of women garment and retail workers surveyed in 2022 said they had experienced one or more forms of gender-based violence or harassment, including physical abuse, unwanted sexual advances, psychological abuse, bullying and rape. To better...
In Bangladesh, 80 percent of women garment workers surveyed in 2019 reported they had experienced or witnessed sexual harassment, molestation or assault, endured extreme verbal abuse or witnessed a factory manager or supervisor abuse and harass other women in the...
