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.
Click here to make a donation.
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.
For many job seekers, joining the ranks of delivery drivers or other app-based workers is sold as entrepreneurship–a way to make money as an independent contractor and be their own boss. But the reality is much different, as workers from Africa to Latin America have...
Workers on digital platforms who are pursuing their rights at work through courts and legislation are making significant gains, especially in Europe and Latin America, according to a new report by the International Lawyers Assisting Workers Network (ILAW...
As the world witnesses some of the greatest challenges to democratic governments since the 1930s, unions offer a strong and essential counter to the trend, according to Cornell University Professor Angela Cornell. “Many studies show that organized labor has...
The digital platform share in the economy in Kyrgyzstan is growing, and with that growth, an increasing number of people are working through these platforms. Due to its growth, the vulnerability of workers in this sector has also become more apparent, especially for...
Kazakhstan has the most developed digital market in the region, and digital platform companies operate in Kazakhstan’s major cities. With the sector’s growth, the vulnerability of workers in this segment has also become more apparent, especially for marginalized...
Haitian garment workers face increasing difficulty in covering basic expenditures as prices soar while wages hover far below the cost of living. Download in English and Haitian Creole.
Unions in the Honduran maquila sector bargain to improve work conditions and address violence at work, and so provide options for those who may migrate to seek jobs, a Solidarity Center report finds. Download in English and Spanish.
In response to mounting public pressure, companies have moved rapidly to launch media campaigns highlighting their commitment to a green future. The global garment industry is no different. Behind much of this “greenwashing” remains the reality that the garment supply...
"The Persistence of Private Power: Sacrificing Rights for Wages," a qualitative survey of human rights violations against live-in domestic workers in South Africa, is co-published by IZWI Domestic Workers Alliance—a network of domestic workers in Johannesburg that...