Brazilian communities along a river near the Amazon are celebrating the government’s decision to halt a blasting and dredging project that could destroy their livelihoods and severely damage the environment. Earlier this month, the Public Prosecutor’s Office recommended that the Brazilian Institute of the Environment and Renewable Natural Resources (IBAMA) suspend its preliminary license for the Araguaia-Tocantins waterway project in the state of Pará.
In suspending the license, the government cited the absence of prior consultation with residents who would be impacted, especially Indigenous communities and quilombolas, and the lack of information on the effects of the project on the communities.
The victory “has impacts not just for the local community, but also for the state and even further,” says Carmen Foro, speaking through an interpreter. Foro, a rural activist from the area, is former secretary-general of the Unity Worker Center in Brazil (CUT). “I feel that I and other community members are being heard, that we have opened a dialogue that this project can’t happen without our participation.” (Foro described her community’s fight for survival in a Solidarity Center Podcast episode last year.)
The project would have involved heavy dredging of the Tocantins River and require removing miles of the rocky Pedral do Lourenço river bed to increase navigability during the dry season and facilitate commodity export. IBAMA approved the preliminary license to begin the project in October 2022, ignoring several government agency recommendations.
Key to Success: Mobilizing a Diverse Coalition
Members of the Caravan in Defense of the River Tocantins meet with residents of Nova Ipixuna to discuss a proposed waterway project that threatened livelihoods and the environment. Credit: Amazon Community
“This time in world history, it is really important to connect to the diversity around us,” Foro said. The campaign was victorious because “we created a grand alliance between the unions and with other movements, like quilombos, the Catholic Church, young people, women, fishers. And that alliance is what gave us strength.
“It was a collective struggle.”
These diverse groups, with support from the Solidarity Center, formed the Caravan in Defense of the Tocantins River to raise awareness about the negative impacts of the waterway construction and demand that the government honor international treaties respecting Indigenous and Tribal People’s right to safeguard and manage the natural resources on their lands. They reached thousands of people, through riverside meetings and in online forums.
With its strength in workers’ collective voice, the Brazilian labor movement was well-positioned to respond to the needs of workers and their communities, including the impact of climate change and environmental degradation on jobs and communities. “The unions in those cities are kind of seen as the principal organization in the social movements,” she said. “Along with the CUT, they were able to be an umbrella organization and give us support.”
The Struggle for Democracy Cannot Rest
Foro, who recently was selected by the new administration of President Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva to serve in the Ministry of Women, says “many women will be impacted by this project, and through my role now at the Ministry of Women, I plan to be alongside the women who are going to be impacted by this project.”
The license suspension is a huge victory, but the process is not over. “Everyone knows that this recommendation doesn’t resolve the issue,” she says. “The problem is still there and it will be a long journey. There still will be something in the middle between this recommendation.”
While she is hopeful about working with the new administration, whose election with the support of union and community groups opened dialogue with historically marginalized communities along the Amazon, Foro is keenly aware they must work to ensure the democratic process thrives.
“It’s important that we continue the fight, continue the struggle. Even with a democratically elected government that is representative now, there is still pressure that is coming from all different sides. The workers are part of that, but also there is the pressure from large companies, and agro-business as well. We have to continue to fight.”
In Eswatini, a landlocked country in southern Africa, union workers are routinely harassed, attacked and even killed for going on strike or holding rallies. In 2021, dozens of workers were killed by security forces in what Amnesty International called “a full-frontal assault on human rights” by the government in response to ongoing pro-democracy protests. In January, prominent human rights lawyer Thulani Maseko was shot dead, hours after a speech by the king warning those calling for democratic reforms that mercenaries would deal with them.
Exiled SWATCAWU leader Sticks Nkambule is receiving support from SCAWU and other unions in Eswatini. Credit: SCAWU
Most recently, Sticks Nkambule, general secretary of the Swaziland Transport, Communication and Allied Workers Union (SWATCAWU), was targeted by the government for leading a strike to improve working conditions. Forced to flee Eswatini, formerly called Swaziland, Nkambule described the interconnected struggle for worker rights, human rights and democracy on the latest Solidarity Center Podcast.
“By bringing together the collective voice of all workers, unions fight for decent working conditions but also for the freedoms fundamental to all democratic societies,” Bader-Blau told Nkambule.
Despite the brutality and repression, Nkambule finds hope in the support from labor and human rights organizations around the world—and in workers themselves.
“What is quite inspiring is that the people of Swaziland are determined to be part of the conversation that is going to change their discourse. It is a reality, activists and, not just labor, beyond labor.”
App-based drivers worldwide work long hours for often minimum wages while facing safety risks every day—and these issues are compounded for women platform workers, according to speakers at a Commission on the Status of Women (#CSW67) side event, Women Workers Organizing: Transforming the Gig Economy through Collective Action.
“Not just in Colombia, but worldwide, women are always the ones that are the most vulnerable and paid the worst,” said Luz Myriam Fique Cardenas, president of Unión de Trabajadores de Plataformas (UNIDAPP) in Colombia. “We suffer harassment. We don’t have security in the streets because we’re women.”
Cardenas joined three women app-based drivers from Kyrgyzstan, Nigeria and the Philippines who are mobilizing platform workers to form unions and stand up for their rights. The March 7 Solidarity Center panel, spearheaded by the organization’s Equality and Inclusion Department, was co-sponsored by the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC).
Although most countries have hard-won labor laws in place, app-based workers are among 2 billion informal sector workers with few legal protections. Women platform workers experience sexual harassment and other forms of gender-based violence on the job along with the risks of injuries from traffic accidents, yet the multimillion dollar companies employing them provide no workplace injury or health coverage.
In Nigeria, where one app-based driver is killed each month, “you are your own security. Every trip you go on, you are at risk,” said Ayobami Lawal, an app-based driver, business graduate and mother of three. Earlier this year, Lawal and other drivers in Nigeria won the country’s first union covering platform-based workers, the Amalgamated Union of App-Based Transport Workers of Nigeria (AUATWN). (Nigerian platform drivers’ campaign for rights on the job is highlighted in this Solidarity Center video, part of the panel presentation.)
“Taxi drivers are seen as informal employees and we have no protections whatsoever,” says Gulmayram Batirbekova, a platform taxi driver in Kyrgyzstan. A single mother of five, she has become an active leader in Kabylan, a platform worker union she says is named after an animal “that is fiercely independent, a leader.”
“Our main effort now is to become recognized as employees so we are entitled to all the protections enshrined in the law, to make sure we make enough money for ourselves and our children.” (Kyrgyz platform drivers’ campaign for rights on the job is highlighted in this Solidarity Center video.)
On the Frontlines of a Tech-Driven Revolution
Hearing from each others’ struggles, panel participants noted the similarities of their experiences trying to support themselves while working within an exploitative employment model that updates what panel moderator Emily Paulin called the “grinding nature” of the work in the industrial revolution.
“You are on the front lines of shifting this tech-driven industrial revolution to shift the perspective that working 14,16 or even 18 hours is even remotely appropriate for us in the 21st century,” said Paulin, Solidarity Center senior organizational development and labor education specialist.
While mobilizing to form unions, platform workers also are pushing for legislation and changes to labor laws in their countries, urging lawmakers to ensure app-based workers have the same rights and protections guaranteed by international law for all workers. Some, such as in Nigeria, are filing class-action lawsuits against platform companies for wage theft and other worker abuses—all part of broad-based campaigns to achieve workplace dignity and respect.
Company Calls the Shots—but Doesn’t Call Them ‘Employees’
Throughout their discussion, panelists homed in on two areas: classification of app-based workers as “independent contractors”—meaning platform companies are not required to follow labor laws such as ensuring a minimum wage and providing basic health and safety coverage—and the lack of transparency and unpredictability of algorithm-based employment.
Whether the companies are global, such as Uber or Glovo, or regionally based, like Deliveroo and Yandex, their business models are the same: Maximize profit by moving operating costs onto workers by calling them independent contractors.
Panelists cited a long list of company requirements they must fulfill to keep their jobs—demonstrating the extent to which they are employees of platform companies and not independent contractors. For instance in the Philippines, where Mary Rose Evardone is a delivery driver for GRAB, the company “has denied we work for them, but they have full control on us. First and foremost they can control the fare. Grab can make it higher or lower anytime.
“Wearing a uniform and bag with Grab logo is compulsory—you need to do that to be identified as a Grab rider,” she said, noting that the company deducts the uniform and bag expenses each month from their paychecks.”
Evardone, a union leader and organizer with the United Delivery Riders of the Philippines (RIDERS-SENTRO) and single mother of five, says she was suspended from the app for organizing her co-workers but has been reinstated while waiting for a court decision on her firing. RIDERS-SENTRO has organized workers in four chapters across several Philippines islands.
Said Batirbekova: “They tell us what to do and we must do that but they won’t give us anything in return. For instance, if we reject a fare, we are blacklisted. When they block your account they do not give you the details, they just lock you down. For you to re-open the account and get reinstated is a real struggle.”
“The fact that we are not recognized as employees is the problem.”
An Algorithm Boss
Not only are app-based drivers directed by employers, the “employer” directing them minute-by-minute is an algorithm.
“Companies want to make everyone think, and even the government think, the algorithms are independent. We all know there is someone programming these conditions and this affects us. Why? Because they’re giving us orders constantly through the algorithm,” says Cardenas.
“It affects women because we often have to accept trips to risky areas. They don’t give us the address where we are going. After we accept the trip we realize we are going to a risky area and we have to go or otherwise we will be blocked.”
Cardenas and others described the unrelenting demands of the algorithms that “make all the decisions on our orders, the distance, but us drivers don’t have any opportunities to choose the order or to assign a value to that order. The algorithm decides on temporary or permanent blocks on drivers. These temporary blocks can last hours or days and don’t allow us to work so we can’t generate income.”
Says Lawal: “We have increase in oil prices, it doesn’t change our fare. We have increases food, it doesn’t change our fare.”
But working through their unions, panelists were optimistic they are improving work for all app-based drivers. “I am sure that this union we have now will be able to talk about this so we all can have a good working environment,” said Lawal.
“Without us, they can’t be an app company. Without drivers, the company won’t function.”
Part of the United Nations, the CSW is the main global intergovernmental body exclusively dedicated to the promotion of gender equality and the empowerment of women. This session’s focus is Innovation and Technological Change Education in the Digital Era for achieving gender equality and the empowerment of all women and girls.
When teachers in Kosovo went on what ultimately became a five-week strike for better pay and improved classroom resources last autumn, they did so as a last resort, says Rrahman Jasharaj, chair of the teacher’s union, SBSSHK.
“For nine months we tried to negotiate with the government. When the government decides to block the doors and dismiss dialog as a tool for a solution, then there is no other option but striking. And this is very difficult situation for all of us,” Jasharaj said on the latest episode of The Solidarity Center Podcast.
Kosovo teachers waged a five-week strike as a last resort after months of seeking talks with the government. Credit: RTE / RL
With no salary increase for years, “Kosovo teachers can hardly afford their livelihood of their families, and they cannot even manage to pass through from one month to another,” he said.
Jasharaj, who in the late 1990s taught children under heartbreaking conditions during the war, said that while the government indicates it will raise salaries in coming weeks, it has shut out teachers and their unions from salary discussions.
He told Solidarity Center Executive Director and podcast host Shawna Bader-Blau that during the war and again throughout the recent strike, teachers and their unions from around the world, including Education International and the U.S.-based AFT, offered their support and resources.
Ultimately, Jasharaj says, it is essential the government see teachers and their unions as partners in building a first-class education system for Kosovo children.
“We’re trying to establish a mutual cooperation network,” he says. Meanwhile: “My colleagues in all Kosovo schools are currently battling for education only by a chalk, sponge, whiteboard, and lacking basic tools and requisites for conducting the proper teaching process.”
Discrimination, marginalization and powerful political forces like authoritarianism do not stop at a country’s border—and that is why it is so important for black women worldwide connect through their unions and allied organizations, panelists said Thursday at a Solidarity Center-sponsored event.
“We need to strengthen this kind of international unity as a way to strengthen our fight in Brazil. Racism does not manifest only in one society,” said Rosana Fernandes, a leader at the national Central Union of Workers (CUT) in Brazil.
Fernandes spoke at the panel, Black Women’s Power: Advancing Partnership Between Unions and Global Racial Justice Movements, a conversation with union leaders and members of the Black Women’s Roundtable on advancing racial and gender justice through labor movements worldwide. Members of the Black Women’s Roundtable, part of the National Coalition on Black Civic Participation, were joined by the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists (CBTU) and the Global African Workers (GAW), along with Sarah McKenzie, Solidarity Center program coordination director.
“The Black Women’s Roundtable seeks the liberation of Black people so they can strengthen the healthy wealthy and wise opportunities for Black women here and around the world,” said Carol Joyner, director of the Labor Project and policy lead at the Black Women’s Roundtable. Members of the Black Women’s Roundtable have engaged in exchange programs with Black women workers in Brazil, Cameroon, Colombia, Ghana, Guinea and Kenya. Elsie Scott, founding director of the Ronald Walters Leadership and Public Policy Center at Howard University and Black Women’s Roundtable member, also took part. Scott is the former president of the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation.
Panelists engaged in conversation with Solidarity Center staff from around the world, including from Albania, Bangladesh, Brazil, Cambodia, Colombia, El Salvador, Honduras, Kenya, Jordan, Lesotho, Mexico, Morocco, Niigeria, Palestine, Serbia and South Africa. Solidarity Center’s Viviana Osorio Pérez, equality and inclusion director and Hanad Mohamud, program coordination and leadership associate director, moderated the panel.
‘We Have to Unite in Our Struggles’
From CBTU’s founding in 1972, members recognized they needed to connect with Black workers globally, Apollos Baker told the audience. CBTU began by coalition-building alongside unions in South Africa, where workers struggled under brutal apartheid laws.
Baker, special assistant to the New York State AFL-CIO secretary treasurer and CBTU activist, said that now, as union officials around the globe are threatened and attacked for “pressing their countries to be pro-worker, pro-Black,” CBTU and GAW work to ensure they and their families have the support they need. “We have to make sure asylum is available to people,” he said.
Agripina Hurtado, former president of the Afro Colombian Labor Council in Colombia and a GAW member, described her conversations with Black women in Colombia about how racial discrimination impacts them in workplaces, and pointed out that it is important for workers to be aware of international laws and “all the instruments of international justice.”
“We have to unite our struggles, our fights, especially women, who suffer discrimination because of their gender, their color,” she said. “We have to be agents of change to transform our society.”
Uniting Globally to End Racism
Hurtado lifted up the game-changing national election of a progressive slate of candidates in 2022 that includes Francia Márquez, a former housekeeper, union member and Colombia’s first Black vice president.
We now “have a vice president who comes from the neighborhoods, who’s Black, worker, the first African descendant woman” a milestone that shows that “women in particular can get to what we work toward.”
Fernandes also described the difficult conditions Black and Indigenous women face, including lack of access to water in marginalized communities and job discrimination even when they have university educations.
CUT has long tackled racism and discrimination, and recently produced videos in which Black men and women describe how racism impacts their lives. The videos also show alternatives, offering ways to fight racism in society. But “the anti-racist struggle must be international,” Fernandes said.
“This kind of international forum is helping us and strengthening our capacity to fight for workers.”
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