Four years after the tortured, lifeless body of Bangladesh garment worker organizer Aminul Islam was discovered in a ditch, his killers have yet to be arrested. Yesterday the Bangladesh Garment and Industrial Workers Federation (BGIWF) and Bangladesh Center for...
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As Bangladesh’s Garment Industry Booms, Workers Struggle for Better Conditions
In discussing the anniversary of the collapse of the Rana Plaza garment factory complex, Global Envision pulls information from a New York Times op-ed by David Welsh, Solidarity Center country director for Indonesia and former country director for Cambodia: “To counteract the brands’ habit of playing one producing country off another, governments from sourcing countries should act together. Rather than be driven by the fear of losing out to one another, they should form a bloc and insist that the big brands set uniform standards for wages, union rights and workplace safety.”
Celebrating Workers: 2015 Year in Photos
Whether building a towering office building in downtown Zimbabwe, sewing garments in a Bangladesh factory or digging for phosphate in Mexico mines, the world's unsung working people demonstrate, time and again, the dignity of work. Here, we celebrate some of the...
Speeches
SHAWNA BADER-BLAU, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR Speech at the 28th triennial convention of the Office and Professional Employees International (OPEIU) in Las Vegas, Nevada, on June 10, 2019. “On Our Terms: How We Redefine Democracy and Reverse Exploitation through Social...
Bangladesh Women Workers Increasingly Empowered
Women garment workers primarily fuel Bangladesh’s $24 billion a year garment industry, yet women are “still viewed as basically cheap labor,” says Lily Gomes, Solidarity Center senior program officer for Bangladesh. “There is a strong need for functioning...
Jobsite Improvements Can’t Happen without Workers
The global economy generally is unregulated and the system encourages multinational corporations to operate or source from countries where wages are low, laws to protect human rights are few or unenforced and workers are impoverished and vulnerable, Shawna Bader-Blau,...
Striking Peru Mineworkers Demand Decent Work
Protesting laws that facilitate mass layoffs and enable large-scale subcontracting of workers’ jobs, tens of thousands of Peruvian mineworkers launched a strike Tuesday at the nation’s gold, copper, tin and silver mines in regions such as Cerro de Pasco, Puno, Ancash,...
Bangladesh Union Organizers Receive Needed Support
When a garment factory union organizer in Gazipur, Bangladesh, was beaten in April while meeting with workers about their nascent union, the Solidarity Center Bangladesh Worker Rights Defense Fund was there to help him cover the medical care he needed, an expense he...
Fact Sheets & Advisories
Fact Sheets Global Garment and Textile Industries: Workers, Rights and Working Conditions (April 2023) Bargaining for Decent Work and Beyond (Honduras), May 2022 Care Work and the Global Economy, February 2022 Domestic Violence is a Worker Rights Issue, February 2022...
Bangladesh Union Leaders Meet with Top U.S. Officials
Bangladesh garment union leader Arman says this past May Day was extra special for him. “I will remember this day the rest of my life. I never imagined that I could share our struggles with a high U.S. official,” says Arman, 26, president of a garment factory union....
Workers & Their Unions Spur Job Safety & Health
Safe and healthy jobs are among workers’ most fundamental rights, and each year on April 28, World Day for Safety and Health at Work, the global labor community shines a spotlight on these rights. Workers and their unions commemorate those who lost their lives on the...
HRW: Bangladesh Government Fails to Keep Workers Safe
Bangladesh garment workers often risk their health and their lives at unsafe factories, and when they seek to form unions to address workplace problems, “factory managers continue to use threats, violent attacks and involuntary dismissals in efforts to stop unions...
Lily Gomes, Champion of Bangladesh Garment Workers
In the hours and days after the multistory Rana Plaza building collapsed in 2013, killing more than 1,100 garment workers in Bangladesh, Solidarity Center Senior Program Officer Lily Gomes was an ever-present figure in the hospitals, where she went from bed to bed...
3 Years Later, No Justice for Slain Garment Worker Leader
Three years after the torture and murder of garment worker union leader Aminul Islam, his killers have not been brought to justice. The AFL-CIO and eight other global global labor rights organizations have written to Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina on the...
Bangladesh Garment Workers Offer Steps to Boost Rights
After workers form a union in Bangladesh’s garment sector, the government often refuses to register the new union for arbitrary or unfair reasons, said trade union leaders and workers Tuesday at a high-level forum organized by the Solidarity Center in Dhaka, the...
Struggling for Human Rights, Achieving Women’s Empowerment
Each year on December 10, the global community marks International Human Rights Day, anchored in the founding document of the United Nations which asserts that each one of us, everywhere, at all times is entitled to the full range of human rights. That founding...
Two Years after Fatal Tazreen Fire, Life Worse for Survivors
November 24 marks the two-year anniversary of the deadly fire at Tazreen Fashions Ltd. in Bangladesh that killed 112 garment workers. Since then, at least 30 garment workers have died in factory fires and 844 have been injured in 68 incidents, according to data...
$11,537 Donated to Bangladesh Worker Rights Defense Fund
The Solidarity Center’s Bangladesh Worker Rights Defense Fund has received $11,537 in contributions as of June 30 and donations already have assisted with medical bills for union organizers beaten while talking with garment workers and provided a one-month salary for...
Bangladesh: More Workers Fired after Forming a Union
More than 60 workers at a Bangladesh washing facility have been fired since late April and at least one union leader has been physically assaulted in what their union says is a campaign to end union representation at the plant. The Sommilito Garments Sramik Federation...
Bangladesh: Attacks on Union Leaders Escalate at Industrial Park
More than a dozen garment factory union leaders in Gazipur, Bangladesh, have been physically attacked or threatened with violence and even death in the past two weeks, according to the Bangladesh Independent Garment Workers Union Federation (BIGUF). The attacks are...