As part of our year in review series, we are highlighting the 12 most popular Solidarity Center web stories of 2017. This story received the most reach on our Facebook page in October. Read the full story here.
When Rose Omamo started work in 1988 as a mechanic in a vehicle assembly plant in Kenya, she was one of two women in a workplace dominated by hundreds of men. Her employer refused to recognize the women’s basic requests, and even her union, the Amalgamated Union of Kenya Metal Workers, negotiated contracts that excluded their concerns.
As part of our year in review series, we are highlighting the 12 most popular Solidarity Center web stories of 2017. This story received the most reach on our Facebook page in November. Read the full story here.
Agricultural work remains one of the most dangerous in the world. And women, who comprise between 50 percent and 70 percent of the informal workforce in commercial agriculture, are especially vulnerable to sexual harassment, physical abuse and other forms of gender-based violence at work.
As the global community gets set to mark International Youth Day August 12, young workers around the world faced with a lack of decent jobs increasingly are joining with union movements and worker associations to challenge policies that do not promote an economy that works for all.
An estimated 290 million young people are jobless and another 150 million are working but impoverished. Many of these 150 million workers are employed in the informal economy, with no guarantee of steady income or access to the benefits of stable employment. As a result, generations of young people are at risk of lifelong poverty and little hope of social mobility. In fact, the ILO identifies precarious employment in the informal economy as the number one impediment to solving global poverty.
But young workers like Kymbat Sherimbayeva are standing up for their rights to decent work and collective bargaining. The Kyrgyzstan garment worker recently joined with some 200 co-workers, most of whom are between the ages of 18 and 25, to improve wages and safety conditions. With the help of trainings provided by the Garment Workers’ Union of Kyrgyzstan, with Solidarity Center support, workers at the factory formed a union, recognizing they could negotiate improvements with management much more effectively as a group than as individuals.
“We are stronger when we are together,” says Sherimbayeva.
Unions also are reaching out to young workers to develop the next generation of leaders. From Kenya, Jane Njoki Muthoni works to enable young women advance to union leadership positions through her roles as president of the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC)-Africa Young Workers Committee and youth leader for the Central Organization of Trade Unions (COTU)-Kenya.
Njoki helps lead COTU Queens, which represents women union members between ages 18 and 35 who are in leadership and aspire to leadership. “As we all know, in trade unions, women are not represented well,” says Njoki.
Because young women are especially likely to work in low-wage, precarious and hazardous jobs, Njoki and the Young Workers Committee also are campaigning for Kenya to ratify International Labor Organization (ILO) conventions covering maternity leave and domestic workers.
“Domestic workers are primarily women, young women, who are frustrated at workplace, are intimidated, face sexual harassment. Our agenda is to make sure that our voices are heard. This movement makes sure that it protects the rights of young women, the rights of young workers in society,” says Njoki.
Elsewhere, young workers are mobilizing in vast numbers to challenge laws and policies that would deny them the ability to attain good wages and stable jobs. For instance in Peru, after lawmakers in 2015 rammed through a law that reduced salaries and benefits for workers under age 25, tens of thousands of young workers and their allies organized meetings with workers across industries and marched in a series of massive protests. Their efforts resulted in the law’s nearly immediate repeal.
Just as unions recognize that young workers represent the single most effective bulwark against economic and social inequality, more and more young workers are standing up for their rights, joining with unions and worker associations to achieve fundamental workplace rights.
As Njoki says, “We are the voice of today and we are the voice of tomorrow.”
The recent murder of a retired Guatemalan farmer and the violent attack against two others while holding a peaceful protest at their former employer, the San Gregorio Piedra Parada Farm, revealed a decades-long failure by the agribusiness to pay into the country’s social protection fund—shorting workers some 1.2 billion quetzals ($165,270).
Eugenio López, 72, was murdered at the farm of his former employer during a peaceful gathering of senior citizens seeking unpaid pension benefits. Credit: Courtesy, Comité de Unidad Campesina
Eugenio López, 72, was murdered June 23 and two others injured when they were fired upon during a peaceful gathering of mostly senior citizens who have been unable to receive their health and pension benefits from the Guatemalan Social Security Institute (IGSS) because San Gregorio has not paid into the fund since 1998, even though it deducted workers’ contributions to the fund.
The protest was spearheaded by the United Committee of Rural Farmers (Comité de Unidad Campesina, CUC) which has been fighting for the retirement benefits of 240 retired workers at the farm, 16 miles outside Coatepeque. Union leaders say other agricultural employers also withhold payment for workers’ retirement.
The network condemned the murder and its statement is supported by a range of labor rights and other human rights groups, including: the National Council of Displaced Persons of Guatemala, the Mayan and Rural Farmer Organization, Nim Ajpu Association of Mayan Lawyers and Notaries and the Social and Popular Assembly and the Women’s Political Alliance.
The World Organization Against Torture (OMCT), the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) and others issued statements and sent letters to the Guatemalan government in response to the Guatemalan union network and its allies call for support and advocacy.
A prominent Uzbek worker rights activist, falsely accused and jailed in 2014, died almost six months ago in prison—with news of his death only reaching the public this week.
Nuraddin Jumaniyozov, who was serving a nine-year term following a conviction for “human trafficking,” died December 31, 2016, according to the Uzbek-German Forum. Prison authorities claim Jumaniyozov died of tuberculosis.
“Mr. Jumaniyozov’s death in prison, away from his family and loved ones, is a tragedy. It shows the lengths the government of Uzbekistan will go to prevent anyone from building a truly independent union representing any group of workers, especially those who are most oppressed,” said Rudy Porter, director of Solidarity Center programs in Europe and Central Asia.
Jumaniyozov’s arrest and subsequent trial, alongside fellow worker rights activist Fahriddin Tillayev, was widely condemned as an orchestrated move to silence the labor movement. Prior to their incarceration, the two had been active in organizing day laborers and migrant workers, who have fled unemployment in rural areas for Tashkent, the capital, and other large cities.
Under Uzbek law, day laborers and migrant workers lack many of the legal protections afforded to other workers, leaving them vulnerable to exploitation and unsafe employment. To solve this injustice, Jumaniyozov and Tillayev were working to establish an independent trade union for day laborers before they were arrested in January 2014.
Before their imprisonment, Jumaniyozov and Tillayev were targeted for their activism. In 2012 and 2013, they were detained and fined on multiple occasions, as their organizing work was gaining ground. Tillayev remains in custody, serving a 10-year sentence. The Cotton Campaign, of which the Solidarity Center is a member, is condemning Jumaniyozov’s unnecessary death and demanding the release of Tillayev.
Freedom of association is severely curtailed Uzbekistan, though the government last year ratified the International Labor Organization’s Convention No. 87, which recognizes freedoms of association and the protection of the right to organize. All Uzbek trade unions are organized under the state-controlled Council of the Federation of Trade Unions. Workers attempting to establish unions independent of the federation—or to educate others on their right to do so—have experienced brutal reprisals.
A free press is a hallmark of democracy. Yet around the world, journalists are under threat for doing their job, risking their lives to report the news, ask difficult questions and hold the corrupt to account. According to an International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) study released for World Press Freedom Day, “journalists face killings, attacks, violence, bans and intimidation on a daily basis” around the world.
At its most extreme, the assault on journalism leads to murder, often with impunity. According to the IFJ, 93 journalists were killed in 2016, and 13 in the opening months of 2017. Over the last decade, most murdered journalists were local reporters covering politics and corruption, notes the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), with about a third of them “first taken captive, the majority of whom were tortured, amplifying the killers’ message of intimidation to the media community.”
Mexico is one of the most dangerous places in the world for journalists, says the CPJ. Since 2010, more than 50 media workers were murdered or disappeared. The country ranks sixth on CPJ’s “Impunity Index,” which tracks the number of unsolved journalist murders as a percentage of population, in nations with five or more unsolved cases. Ahead of it are primarily countries in conflict: Somalia, Iraq, Syria, the Philippines and South Sudan.
Women journalists—targeted for their job as well as their gender—face additional challenges, including harassment and threats in the field, at the office and online. A soon-to-be-published survey of 214 women journalists in Pakistan, conducted by the Solidarity Center and Civic Action Resources, says that when women journalists are sexually harassed, “social taboos, segregation and stigma keep them
from speaking openly about it and seeking support. Since Pakistan is an honor-based society, any attack on a woman’s reputation can have serious repercussions for her, both professionally and personally.” The Solidarity Center works with Pakistani journalists—women and men—to achieve gender equality at the workplace and in the stories they report.
The CPJ also noted that a record number of media workers—259—were jailed in 2016. Nonetheless, journalists and their unions are taking a stand against rising authoritarianism and increasing restrictions on their ability to work. Around the world, reports the IFJ journalists’ unions are submitting formal protests to national and regional human rights bodies, advancing legal challenges and staging actions—from strikes to protests—“to defend media freedom and the rights of journalists.”
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