To raise awareness of the Kyrgyzstan’s responsibility to improve workplace safety and strengthen workplace inspections, the Solidarity Center last year launched a program to increase the visibility of the country’s Labor Inspectorate among workers and employers through education seminars and other consultative fora.
Significant progress has been made. Kyrgyzstan’s Labor Inspectorate is reporting that in 2022, as compared to the year prior:
The number of identified violations increased from 18 to 1,402
The value of fines imposed on employers increased from $598 to $13,126
The amount of compensation paid to workers killed or injured in workplace accidents increased from $176,723 to $380,501
The value of wages collected by sickened or injured workers increased from $4,023 to $103,039
The number of employers trained on Kyrgyzstan’s safety standards increased from none to 74.
The right to a safe and healthy work environment place is a fundamental right of every worker. Developing partnership between Kyrgyzstan’s unions, government and employers is yielding results by better capturing and addressing safety violations, and ensuring compensation and wages to those who are sickened or injured on the job.
“The tripartite platform proved to be an exceedingly effective tool in ensuring that the voices of workers were heard by both employers and the government,” says Trade Union of Construction and Building Materials Workers Republican Committee Chair Eldiyar Karachalov.
To mark April 28, World Day for Safety and Health at Work, and in collaboration with unions, the Labor Inspectorate conducted a high-profile campaign to educate the public about issues surrounding safety at work and publicize the Labor Inspectorate’s new website and online form for reporting worker rights violations. Unions, with Solidarity Center support, contributed success stories, including on video for state television and social network distribution.
“[The Labor Inspectorate] helped me get the pay I was owed,” reports primary school teacher N.A. Usubalieva.
The Nigerian working group of a campaign led by the Organization of Trade Unions of West Africa (OTUWA) is collaborating on a regional campaign demanding more investment by governments in the health of their citizens. OTUWA represents trade union national centers in the 15 West African countries comprising the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS).
Addressing journalists at a public event in Abuja, Nigeria working group coordinator Dr. Ayegba Ojonugwa, last month warned that governments must increase health workers’ wages and improve their working conditions—including safety—to staunch the outflux of health workers from the beleaguered sector.
“We are here today to further advocate that health care is a human right,” said Ojonugwa, who noted that West Africa’s governments are not implementing the 15 percent minimum annual budgetary health allocation to which African heads of state agreed in the landmark 2001 Abuja Declaration. Currently, no country in the region achieves this percentage and Nigeria’s health care indicators are some of the worst in Africa—in part because medical professionals are in such short supply there.
In Nigeria, OTUWA’s “Health Care Is a Human Right” campaign—launched in Abuja in March 2021—is supported by the International Federation of Women Lawyers (FIDA), the Medical and Health Workers Union of Nigeria (MHWUN), the National Association of Nigeria Nurses and Midwives (NANNM) and labor federations Nigeria Labor Congress (NLC) and Trade Union Congress of Nigeria (TUC).
In the region, the campaign is supported by OTUWA’s affiliates together with many of their health sector unions. A 2020 survey of 700 health workers living in Gambia, Ghana, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone and Togo provides a window into the region’s health-sector shortcomings and presents a raft of recommendations for ensuring the protection of health worker rights and effective, accessible health care for all.
From Bangladesh to Kyrgyzstan, Mexico and Sri Lanka, hundreds of thousands of workers and their families celebrated International Workers Day May 1, honoring the dignity of work and the accomplishments of the union movement in defending human rights, job stability, fair wages and safe workplaces. For workers in Philippines, the event took on special importance, as they mourned and protested the recent stabbing and murder of Alex Dolorosa, a BIEN paralegal and officer organizing BPO workers in Bacolod, vowing to continue his work.
Click here for our photo essay of May Day 2023 events by Solidarity Center allies around the globe.
Kyrgyzstan, May Day 2023. Credit: Aizhan Ruslanbekova/Solidarity Center
Sri Lanka, May Day 2023. Credit: Prasdhini Niroshika/Solidarity Center
Philippines, May Day 2023. Credit: Andreanna Garcia/Solidarity Center
Migrant domestic workers join with their Jordanian union brothers and sisters to celebrate May Day and campaign together for equal rights and wage protections for workers regardless of citizenship status. Credit: Sara Khatib/Solidarity Center
Kyrgyzstan, May Day 2023. Credit: Aizhan Ruslanbekova/Solidarity Center
Mexico, May Day 2023. Credit: Luis Iván Stephen
Philippines, May Day 2023. Credit: Andreanna Garcia/Solidarity Center
Following a 136-day strike, Montenegro’s telecom workers are celebrating a collective agreement that reverses a 14-year wage freeze and interrupts more than a decade of alleged union-busting tactics by Crnogorski Telekom (CT), majority owned by Deutsche Telecom since 2005.
The agreement won by the Trade Union of Telecom of Montenegro (STCG) immediately increases workers’ wages by 15 percent and provides an additional 5 percent total wage increase through 2025. Workers also negotiated improved benefits, job cut limits and, for the first time, severance pay.
“The company could not claim any more that the wage increase was inadmissible, given that every year it distributed dividends to shareholders and paid bonuses to already highly paid managers,” says Burić. “Since 2008, their profit has exceeded half a billion euros,” he says.
CT last gave workers a pay raise in 2008, even though consumer prices in Montenegro increased more than 45 percent from 2006 through 2021, and workers have been carrying an increased workload. The company slashed jobs by almost two-thirds since Deutsche Telecom took majority ownership, says STCG.
During its ongoing wage battle with the union, CT violated the country’s labor law by threatening to abolish the union’s collective agreement and refusing to negotiate with workers’ democratically elected leaders, say unions.
The agreement was won in spite of CT’s effort to violate numerous fundamental labor rights in the most egregious way,” says STCG President Željko Burić.
Solidarity support for STCG’s campaign was provided in Montenegro by the Union of Free Trade Unions of Montenegro (UFTUM) and its affiliates. Other union and worker rights organizations supporting the campaign included the Albanian Telecommunications Union SPPTSH, Alliance One Telekom Union (OTU), the Croatian Telecommunications Union HST, the cooperation project of the European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC) under the European Commission with regional network Solidarnost, the Transport and Telecommunications Union of Serbia GS SITEL Nezavisnost, Germany’s Ver.di, ETUC, the Solidarity Center, the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) and UNI Global Union. STCG is an ITUC member and founding UFTUM member.
Ten years after the multi-story Rana Plaza building collapsed in Bangladesh, killing 1,138 workers and injuring thousands more, garment workers and their unions say that although safety has improved in some instances, much more needs to be done. And fundamental to achieving safe working conditions is ensuring workers have the freedom to form unions.
“When a trade union exists in a factory, the union committee, on behalf of the workers, can negotiate with management about the problems the workers face,” says Babul Akter, general secretary of the Bangladesh Garment and Industrial Workers Federation (BGIWF).
Credit: Solidarity Center
In the wake of the Rana Plaza tragedy, which came months after a factory fire at Tazreen Fashions that killed more than 100 garment workers, unions and fashion brands created the Bangladesh Accord on Fire and Building Safety. The Accord, which covers factories producing ready-made garments, has been successful in large part because it is a legally binding agreement. Accord inspectors have conducted more than 40,000 inspections and required 513 factories to comply with remediation.
Yet with more than 4,000 garment factories and more than 4 million workers, 58 percent of them women, safety hazards remain. A series of developments have weakened implementation of the Accord, including the ejection of the Accord Foundation from its office in Bangladesh and its replacement with an employer- and brand-dominated process in which worker voice is limited. And workers seeking to form unions to improve safety and health increasingly are facing employer and government harassment and even violence. Democratic unions encounter stiff resistance from authorities when they apply for the registration required to operate legally.
“The greatest challenges exercising freedom of association is the adverse mindset of employers,” says Rashadul Alam Raju, general secretary of the Bangladesh Independent Garment Workers Union Federation (BIGUF). “Whenever workers organize, the employers try different means, including harassing and using violence against the workers, filing false legal cases against them and terminating them to prevent them from organizing. The reluctance of government bodies to address the problems is the second challenge.”
Roadblocks to Forming Unions
In 2022, the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) ranked Bangladesh among the 10 worst countries in the world for working people. In the garment sector, the country’s largest industry, industrial police have obstructed and brutally attacked striking workers seeking to form unions. In 2021, police fired live rounds and used batons and tear gas to disperse workers, killing six workers and severely injuring others.
Without unions, millions of garment workers who produce clothing imported by the United States and Europe are afraid to say “No” when asked to work in unsafe jobs—the same conditions that existed at Rana Plaza. Unable to collectively negotiate higher wages, garment workers often live in poverty conditions, even as the clothing they make accounts for nearly 82 percent of Bangladesh’s exports, making the ready-made garment industry vital to the national economy.
#RanaPlazaNeverAgain
Thousands of garment workers, like Mosammat Mukti Khatun (above, looking at the Rana Plaza rubble) who survived the Rana Plaza disaster, remain too injured or ill to work and support their families. Solidarity Center/Balmi Chisim
The day before Rana Plaza collapsed on April 24, 2013, structural engineers found cracks so severe in the building they advised that no one enter it. Yet factory managers threatened workers with the loss of a month’s pay if they did not return to work. Ultimately, building owner Mohammed Sohel Rana was arrested after trying to flee the country.
But for many of the workers who survived, the injuries they sustained were so debilitating they were unable to work again and support their families. Moriom Begum, a sewing operator at New Wave Style, one of five factories in Rana Plaza, was among many survivors whose stories the Solidarity Center chronicled over the years. Moriom remained pinned beneath furniture for two days before she was rescued. She lost her right hand, suffered constant pain and could not return to work. Yet survivors and the families of the deceased in most cases waited for years after the collapse to receive compensation.
“If there was a trade union, this incident would never have happened,” says Srity Akter, general secretary of the Garment Workers Solidarity Federation (GWSF), who spent days at the Rana Plaza site digging through rubble to rescue trapped workers. Garment workers like Srity long ago vowed #RanaPlazaNeverAgain, a phrase activists for safe factory conditions have adopted across social media and the name of site memorializing Rana Plaza workers.
To commemorate the 10th anniversary of the preventable Rana Plaza tragedy this month, hundreds of garment workers, trade union leaders and their allies in Bangladesh marched through the streets, and held a workers’ conference to demand an end to harassment in workplaces when workers seek to form a union, and called for reforming laws that allow systematic oppression of workers.
Brands, Bangladesh Government Must Do More
When Halima joined with her co-workers at Hop Lun Apparels Ltd., they experienced many obstacles before they successfully formed a union. Now general secretary of the Hop Lun Apparels Ltd. workers’ union and a member of Sommilito Garments Sramik Federation (SGSF), Halima says workers have one of the most successful unions in the garment sector and have signed several collective bargaining agreements that have raised wages and improved safety. The contrast between working conditions at Hop Lun and Rana Plaza is stark.
Solidarity Center, working alongside partner organizations in many key garment exporting countries, are calling on governments and brands to take steps to establish an environment where all workers in the garment sector have safe, decent working conditions and earn a living wage. To attain that:
All fashion brands should sign the International Accord and take responsibility for the safety of workers in their supply chain.
The government of Bangladesh should remove barriers to trade union registration, amend the labor law to come into compliance with international standards.
The Bangladesh Department of Labor should uphold its responsibility to protect workers’ rights by rigorously investigating cases of unfair labor practices. It should act swiftly to prosecute employers who violate the rights of workers to freely organize, join and participate in labor organizations of their choosing and to collectively bargain.
Says Anju, president of Jesus Fashion Shramik Union: “No organization ensures dignity like a trade union does.”
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When Halima joined with her co-workers at Hop Lun Apparels Ltd., they experienced many obstacles before they successfully formed a union. Now general secretary of the Hop Lun Apparels Ltd. workers’ union and a member of Sommilito Garments Sramik Federation