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Jennifer Kuhlman, country director of the Solidarity Center, and Timothy Ryan, the organizations’s regional program director, said the government has a unique opportunity to reform the Bangladesh Labor Act and Export Processing Zones Authority Act expressing hopes that it could be done through broad-based input from stakeholders and the people, building consensus and creating a more just and reliable legal framework.
The Domestic Workers Solidarity Network in Jordan is the first initiative of its kind in the country and one of few in the region. The network, whose motto is “Sisters in Solidarity,” aims to serve and support domestic workers through awareness-raising, legal assistance and roundtables in coordination with the Adalah Center for Human Rights Studies.
It’s no surprise that Phillips doesn’t want to talk about its South Asia seafood operations — few international seafood corporations do, according to Tim Ryan, Asia regional program director at the Washington, D.C.-based worker advocacy group Solidarity Center.
The United Nations Security Council recently adopted Resolution 2371—the latest sanctions on North Korea. In so doing, the Security Council acquiesced to the continuation of the country’s state-sponsored, forced-labor-for-export scheme and abandoned an important opportunity to protect the rights and dignity of workers as defined by UN conventions, writes the Solidarity Center’s Jeff Vogt.
Newly enacted laws have jeopardized the freedoms laid out by Cambodia’s constitution and, having been widely misapplied by officials, left less than 12 percent of Cambodians confident in exercising their rights, according to an NGO/Solidarity Center report released on Thursday.
“You have to assess minimum wages in the context of the country itself and, in that context, it’s not a living wage,” said David Welsh, Indonesia and Malaysia director at the Solidarity Center.”
“We live in a world that is feeling the impact of economic inequality. Workers are paying their fair share of taxes and oftentimes are receiving very little in terms of service delivery,” said Christopher Johnson, Solidarity Center country program director, West Africa.
“Sok Phany, a legal officer at the Solidarity Center, an NGO that supports labor unions and worker rights, said she didn’t think the four would be charged as the complaint may have only been intended to silence them. ‘The worker representatives were not at the scene when the road was blocked,’ Ms. Phany said.”
“20 years ago you’d hear in different parts of the world ‘Yeah, we have child labor because it’s our economic advantage,’ or that it’s part of the culture. A lot of places you just don’t hear that anymore. The paradigm has shifted,” said Solidarity Center Director of Asia Programs, Tim Ryan.
“Workers are generally left out of these discussions,” says Sonia Mistry, senior Asia program officer at the Solidarity Center. “There is an opportunity and importance in engaging workers and their unions. If we’re actually talking about poverty alleviation and making migration a choice, then you need to engage workers and look at decent work in the country of origin.”