The Cotton Campaign—a global coalition of human rights, labor, responsible investor and business organizations—yesterday ended its call for a global boycott of Uzbek cotton at an event hosted by the country’s Ministry of Labor for media, activists and government officials in Tashkent, Uzbekistan. The announcement came as the Uzbek Forum for Human Rights released a report finding no central-government–imposed forced labor in the 2021 harvest, a success which the Campaign is proposing as a template for removing forced labor from the world’s supply chains. An estimated 2 million children have been removed from child labor and half a million adults from forced labor in Uzbekistan’s cotton sector since the multi-sectoral campaign formed.
“[We] have been looking forward to this day for over 14 years,” said Cotton Campaign co-founder and former U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor Bennett Freeman, who saluted the determination and courage of Uzbek-based activists and cotton-field monitors.
The historic achievement came after persistent engagement by Uzbek activists, who took on extraordinary personal risk to uncover and document forced labor, joined by multinational brands, international advocates and worker rights groups like the Solidarity Center, and a commitment by the government of Uzbekistan to end its use of forced labor. The boycott began in response to a 2009 petition by Uzbek civil-society activists that launched the Cotton Campaign’s Uzbek Cotton Pledge Against Forced Labor. Since then, 331 brands and retailers signed the pledge, including many of the world’s largest brands, among them C&A, Gap Inc. and Tesco.
“As a journalist and citizen of this country, I am proud to participate,” said Uzbek Forum for Human Rights cotton field monitor Muazzam Ibragimova, who added that her own children were likely headed to the cotton fields as recently as a decade ago.
Although Uzbek Forum’s report found that cotton was harvested without systematic state-imposed forced labor, monitors found cases of coercion and interference by local authorities, as well as individual cases of forced labor. Because independent groups that conduct field level monitoring and capacity building are unable to register and operate freely, progress is “at risk” says the Cotton Campaign in its press release. Given repressive policies that limit freedom of association in Uzbekistan and supply chain practices that have contributed to eroding labor standards in garment producing countries around the world, the Cotton Campaign is calling on the Uzbek government and brands to support worker rights as the industry is poised to grow, and for the government to open the country’s civil society to create the enabling environment necessary for responsible sourcing.
“We need a voice from the ground,” said the Solidarity Center Senior Program Officer for Europe and Central Asia Abby McGill, who added that workers must lead the charge if there is to be permanent success and continued progress in Uzbekistan’s fight against forced labor.
Cotton Campaign Steering Committee member, GLI-ILRF Forced Labor Program Director and human rights lawyer Allison Gill recognized the efforts and courage of Uzbek Forum monitors and pointed to the coalition’s success in Uzbekistan as a template for combating the use of forced labor in cotton sourced from other countries. More than one fifth of the world’s cotton is produced in China’s Xinjiang region where significant evidence of human rights abuses, including suspected forced labor, has been reported.
The Cotton Campaign, of which the Solidarity Center is a long-time member, is a global coalition of international human and labor rights NGOs, independent trade unions, brand and retail associations, responsible investor organizations, supply chain transparency groups, and academic partners. The campaign encourages responsible sourcing to ensure that reforms continue to benefit workers, farmers, and civil society.
GLJ–ILRF is a newly merged organization that brings strategic capacity to cross-sectoral work on global value chains and labor migration corridors.
Uzbek Forum for Human Rights is a Berlin-based NGO dedicated to protecting and promoting human rights and strengthening civil society in Uzbekistan.
As the world commemorates International Women’s Day, women workers around the world are leading struggles to safeguard democracy and improve wages and working conditions, often facing arrest or violence.
Berinette, a worker who was part of the February 9 and 10 demonstrations, spoke about the shocking police violence. “We thought they were protecting us and they were destroying us,” she said. “They shot rubber bullets and they fired tear gas at us. They beat us but, despite this, we didn’t fear and we were never afraid.”
Mexico
In February, General Secretary María Alejandra Morales Reynoso led the National Independent Union for Workers in the Auto Industry (SINTTIA) to a landmark election victory in Mexico, when the independent union won the right to represent over 6,000 workers at a truck plant in Silao.
In a union election with a 90 percent turnout, SINTTIA won with 4,192 votes out of 5,389 valid ballots. SINTTIA defeated the entrenched CTM labor group that had held the contract at the plant for 25 years and derived its strength from cultivating relationships with politicians and corporations while keeping wages low.
SINTTIA General Secretary Maria Alejandra Morales Reynoso Credit: Solidarity Center
Workers succeeded in making their voices heard despite attempts to buy votes and threats of violence against union leaders and activists. Just before voting began, three individuals threatened Reynoso and her family with harm if she showed up to vote.
“They just came by my house, two men and a woman, telling me to send a statement saying neither I nor any other worker should show up tomorrow, or if not there will be problems,” said Morales Reynoso.
In a podcast interview with Solidarity Center Executive Director Shawna Bader-Blau, Morales Reynoso said the union’s victory “gave people hope, hope that it was possible to represent workers freely.
“We proved it’s possible to get organized and to fight for our rights and to leave behind the fear that we’re going to lose our jobs,” Morales Reynoso said.
Myanmar
On February 1, one year after the overthrow of Myanmar’s democratically elected government by a military junta, Phyo Sandar Soe, general secretary of the Confederation of Trade Unions Myanmar (CTUM), was among five-member presidium elected by the First People’s Assembly of the National Unity Consultative Council (NUCC). Sandar is the youngest person and the only woman elected to the presidium.
Women workers played a leading role early on in the protests against the Myanmar coup, in which the country’s 450,000 garment workers were especially active in organizing civil disobedience and factory shutdowns. They have asked international corporate fashion brands to cease doing business in Myanmar until democracy is restored.
CTUM General Phyo Sanda Soe, Credit: Solidarity Center
An estimated 1,500 people have been killed since the military coup, and nearly 12,000 imprisoned, most tortured. The military junta especially targeted union leaders, arresting dozens, and many others fled the country or went into hiding. Demonstrating workers continue to be arrested under the pretense of spreading Covid-19 as Cambodian authorities repeatedly abuse the country’s COVID-19 law to break up the strike
Speaking from a safehouse, in a podcast interview with Bader-Blau, Sandar spoke of the strength of workers standing together despite repression and personal danger.
“We are facing a bloody crackdown, but all people protect each other. We are finding solutions to fight back. That’s why I want to tell our brothers and sisters to endure this duration because we have very high motivation to fight back against the junta, she said.”
Cambodia
In early January in Cambodia, Labor Rights Supported Union of Khmer Employees (LRSU) President Sithar Chhim was one of nine union leaders arrested during a peaceful strike and was violently taken away when she attempted to join her colleagues in a picket line at the NagaWorld hotel and casino.
Hundreds of slot machine workers, dealers, housekeepers and technicians are on strike to demand the reinstatement of 365 workers who were fired months earlier. While management claimed the layoffs were due to COVID-19, union leaders say nearly all of those laid off were union leaders or members.
The layoffs took place shortly after the union won a wage increase that boosted pay between 18 percent and 30 percent and secured the reinstatement of Chhim, who was suspended from her job in September 2019 for defending the right of a union member to wear a shirt with a message that called for higher wages.
“Dave Welsh, country director for Thailand and Myanmar of the Solidarity Center, spoke with The Diplomat’s Luke Hunt about growing support for independent trade unions as the COVID-19 pandemic continues to punish regional economies, forcing businesses to restructure–which all too often leaves workers stranded without compensation.”
Violence broke out on Wednesday, February 23, as Haitian police opened fire on garment workers demonstrating for higher wages and killed a reporter, according to witness reports. Two other reporters were injured at the scene in Port-au-Prince.
Maxihen Lazzare, who worked for Haitian media group Roi des Infors, died of his wounds at a hospital on Wednesday. Haitian police responded to Lazzare’s death in a press release saying they are launching an investigation and that the police are implicated.
The union coalition released a statement denouncing Wednesday’s violence and condemning “the kind of conspiracy of the police and employers to block the mobilization to force us to accept a minimum wage that cannot meet our needs so that they can continue to suck blood and exploit workers.”
Protests have been ongoing since Haitian workers staged a peaceful demonstration calling for an increase in the minimum wage earlier this month. In January, a coalition of nine trade unions issued an open letter to the prime minister seeking a minimum wage increase from 500 gourdes (about $4.82 a day) to 1,500 gourdes ($14.62). They noted that wages have been stagnant for years while the increasingly high cost of living and rising inflation were eroding workers’ ability to live with dignity.
In response to garment worker demands, the government mandated a new minimum wage earlier this week, bumping pay to about $6.53 a day.
In 2019, the Solidarity Center conducted a wage assessment, with Haitian workers and their unions, and found that garment worker wages then covered less than a quarter of the estimated cost of living.
A study conducted by Insan-Leilek, a Kyrgyz migrant worker foundation, and the Trade Union of Migrants of the Kyrgyz Republic documents abuses suffered by many who migrate to Russia to earn their livelihoods as nannies, adult caregivers, cooks, cleaners and live-in domestic workers. An estimated 750,000 Kyrgyz people have migrated to Russia for work; official Kyrgyz government data estimates that half that number are women.
“We are invisible people,” says 34-year-old survey respondent and domestic worker Almagul. (Her last name is withheld to protect her livelihood and personal safety.)
“The Problems of Informal Domestic Workers,” reflects the experiences of 300 Kyrgyz migrant domestic workers, from whom 24 were selected for in-depth interviews by two migrant worker experts. Respondents’ jobs were in the Russian cities of Kazan, Moscow, Novosibirsk, Samara and Yekaterinburg.
The study reveals a wide range of employment abuses among the mostly female domestic workers who were surveyed, including sexual harassment and violence, other forms of physical and emotional abuse, unpaid hours, excessive workloads, denial of time off and wage theft.
More than 80 percent of the female survey participants who provided in-depth interviews reported sexual harassment at the hands of their employers. Of this group, almost 4 percent had experienced severe sexual violence, including rape, while 25 percent were subjected to indecent touching that included unwanted touching of intimate body parts. More than 30 percent of those reporting sexual harassment and violence said they could not ask anyone for help or support and, of this number, 7 percent attempted suicide. More than 70 percent of those providing in-depth interviews said they were often beaten, allegedly for laziness, and that they can rarely go out.
Two survey participants reported having become surrogate mothers for their employers without a written agreement or fair compensation.
Almost 90 percent of the larger group surveyed (300 respondents) were working without a formal contract because they had secured their jobs through personal connections. Such workers are vulnerable to unregulated work in which hours, pay, duties and conditions are determined at the whim of the employer, some of whom are unscrupulous and exploitive.
“I worked 24 hours a day, and I looked after the children, cooked, did the laundry. Weekends were out of the question,” reports Miraida about a job she held in Russia when she was 18.
Kyrgyz domestic workers in Russia provide an average of 10 hours of work per day, a survey of the larger group of 300 found. Of these, those who live in an employers’ home are working an average of more than 12 hours per day. More than 40 percent said they perform additional services that were not agreed with the employer at the time of hiring, without adjusted compensation.
Respondents were recruited for the survey through Trade Union of Migrants of the Kyrgyz Republic WhatsApp groups and Insan-Leilek diaspora organizations and migrant communities. In-depth interviews were conducted online and over the phone.
Russia is the main destination for approximately 750,000 of Kyrgyzstan’s labor migrants. Official data on the percentage of migrant women employed in domestic work in Russia does not exist.
Following Haitian unions’ open letter to the prime minister demanding an increase in the minimum wage, factory workers in the nation’s capital staged a peaceful protest outside the SONAPI industrial park in Port-au-Prince on February 9 and 10.
Videos and photos posted on Twitter showed large crowds pouring into the Metropolitan Industrial Park in the Port-au-Prince community of Delmas. Demonstrators danced to music and held up tree branches, a popular symbol of uprooting or change.
The workers of Haiti strike again. Today, in Port-au-Prince. They demand living wages from greedy transnational capitalists to make the clothes we love to wear here in the States. pic.twitter.com/Z5jbplibAI
Police fired tear gas, injuring more than a dozen workers, most of them women. The industrial park—which is home to 16 manufacturers, including garment and electronic factories, and employs at least 12,000 workers—was shut down on Thursday as the demonstration continued. Central union confederations (Confederation of Haitian Workers (CTH), Confederation of Workers in the Public and Private Sectors (CTSP), National Central of Haitian Workers (CNOHA) and EntèSendikal Premye Me-Batay Ouvriye (ESPM-BO)) denounced the actions of Intervention and Law Enforcement Corps (CIMO) against peaceful protesters, calling it [English translation] “torture and other cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment.”
Workers at factories producing textiles and other goods make just $4.82 (500 gourdes) per day for eight hours of work and are demanding an increase to $15 (1,500 gourdes) per day. Three years have passed since the wage has increased. Their demands come as a sharp rise in inflation has increased the cost of basic goods and services such as transportation, health care, and education to as much as three times the current minimum wage.
In 2019, the Solidarity Center conducted a wage assessment, with Haitian workers and their unions, and found that garment worker wages then covered less than a quarter of the estimated cost of living.
Workers are continuing peaceful demonstrations until their demands are met.
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