If working people could find good jobs, they would not be forced into a desperate search for employment in other countries, a process that means they often are exploited and abused, says Caroline Khamati Mugalla, executive secretary of the East African Trade Union...
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Labor Migration Conference Opens Tomorrow
Prexedes, 41, supports her family as a domestic worker, juggling jobs at three employers in Johannesburg, South Africa. Originally from Zimbabwe, Prexedes says after her divorce, she had no choice but to seek work cleaning homes, cooking, and caring for others'...
‘Fair Migration’ Conference to Address Worker Exploitation
Edias was 12 years old when he traveled from Zimbabwe to South Africa to look for a job in agriculture. Now in his mid-twenties, he and other farm workers had been working 12 hour days, 7 days a week, and paid less than half the legal minimum wage when they asked the...
Maina Kiai Receives AFL-CIO Human Rights Award
Describing United Nations Special Rapporteur Maina Kiai as “an effective watchdog against crackdowns of freedom of association and assembly,” AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka presented Kiai with the 2016 AFL-CIO George Meany-Lane Kirkland Human Rights Award. “Maina...
ILO Forced Labor Protocol in Effect Today
When the employer of a migrant domestic worker takes her passport and refuses to return it if she seeks to leave, that is forced labor. When a family works at a brick kiln to pay off a debt, their children prevented from attending school, that is forced labor. When...
Make People > Profits: UN Special Rapporteur
Millions of workers in the global economy have been disenfranchised from their rights, either tacitly or deliberately by governments, exacerbating “global inequality, poverty, violence and child and forced labor,” says Maina Kiai, United Nations Special Rapporteur on...
Building Alliances to End Gender-Based Violence at Work
Gender-based violence (GBV) is one of the most prevalent human rights violations in the world—and yet not enough is done to prevent it, especially at the workplace. “Without gender equality, we cannot have worker rights, and without worker rights, we cannot have...
Building Alliances to Challenge Corporate Power
Women, people of color, indigenous and other disenfranchised and marginalized groups have been hit especially hard by the increasing concentration of transnational corporate power and escalating global economic inequality—but a new report showcases how women and...
Trafficking Report Highlights Uzbekistan Abuses
Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, two countries where forced labor in cotton harvests is rampant, have been downgraded to the lowest ranking in the U.S. State Department’s 2016 Trafficking in Persons Report released this morning. The report also downgraded Myanmar (Burma)...
Share Your Views on Worker Rights with the United Nations
Update: The survey is now available in Spanish and French. La encuesta está disponible en francés y español. L'enquête est disponible en français et espagnol. The United Nations Special Rapporteur is partnering with the Solidarity Center to research a report on the...
UN Consultation on Worker Rights Gathers Global Experts
More than two dozen worker, union and human rights experts from around the world gathered last week in Kenya to discuss some of the most intractable global labor issues: informalization of work, gender inequality, migrant worker rights and the erosion of workers’...
‘I Was a Garment Worker and I Know Exploitation’
The “Made in Jordan” label is familiar to U.S. consumers shopping for shirts, jeans and other clothes. Mervat Jumhawi, a Jordanian union organizer, is actively ensuring the largely migrant workforce that cuts and sews these garments does so in safe conditions,...
Good Jobs, Decent Work—Key to UN’s New 15-Year Goals
A vigil tonight at the United Nations kicks off events around the world body’s broad new 17-point agenda that aims in part to end extreme poverty, eradicate hunger and ensure clean water and sanitation. The 193 UN member states have debated the Sustainable Development...
Let’s Create a Global Civil Rights Movement
With a rousing call to action, Solidarity Center Executive Director Shawna Bader-Blau urged the more than 200 participants in the final session of the Solidarity Center's Labor Migration: Who Benefits? conference to "exercise our voice for a bigger push for global...
Labor Migration Conference Starts Monday!
Human rights lawyer Preeda Tongcumnum is among the more than 200 migrant worker advocates gathering in Bogar, Indonesia, this week to take part in the Solidarity Center labor migration conference. As assistant to the secretary general at the Human Rights and...
Economic Growth without Jobs Fuels Migration
Governments of migrants’ countries of origin could be doing much more to harness the phenomenon of labor migration toward inclusive growth, according to a new report that investigated high-migration communities in Indonesia. The study, which examined the role of labor...
ILO: Precarious Work Rises, Incomes Fall around the World
More than 60 percent of workers worldwide, predominantly women, are in temporary, part-time or short-term jobs in which wages are falling, a growing trend that is fueling global income inequality and poverty, according to an International Labor Organization (ILO)...
“My Work Is Decent Work and I Want Decent Pay”
Myrtle Witbooi spent decades toiling as a domestic worker in South Africa and later built on her experience to become a national and global leader for domestic worker rights. Now general secretary of the South African Domestic Service and Allied Workers Union...
Violence at the Workplace: ‘They Treated Us Like Slaves’
Gender-based violence on the job occurs far more often than most people realize, and domestic workers—isolated in individual homes—are especially vulnerable to abuse, said domestic workers, union organizers and experts Wednesday at a panel discussion focusing on women...
How Much Progress for Women in Past 20 Years?
As more than 8,500 union members and other civil society activists gather at the United Nations in New York for the Commission on the Status of Women meeting, new research shows women have made some gains in the two decades since the landmark global meeting on women...