Dec 22, 2017
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 August. Read the full story here.
As a young woman working in her company’s IT department, Jane Muthoni Njoki was frustrated by what she says were employer attempts to push her around because of her youth and sex. But rather than quit her job, which she contemplated, she ran for a leadership position in her union, determined to work with others to make change on the job—and in society.
Dec 21, 2017
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 September. Read the full story here.
Gunmen on a motorcycle assassinated another Guatemalan union leader on Friday, bringing to 87 the number of labor leaders murdered in the country since November 2004.
Tomás Francisco Ochoa Salazar, disputes secretary for the Bremen Union (SITRABREMEN), was leaving the meat-processing plant where he worked in Guatemala City when he was shot. Andy Noel Godinez, also a union member, suffered non-life-threatening injuries in the incident. Ochoa Salazar leaves behind a wife and three children.
Dec 20, 2017
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.
Dec 19, 2017
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.
Dec 18, 2017
In Mombasa, Kenya, a labor broker offered Frank Wetindi a job in Dubai as a driver. Wetindi went into debt to pay the broker, but was given a job unloading planes in brutal heat, for a salary far less than he was promised.
Living with eight men crammed in one room, Wetinidi says the experience overall “was not good.” When he became sick and went to the hospital, the employer deducted the cost from his salary, leaving him with nothing in his account. He says he was denied “freedom of workshop, freedom of movement and freedom of communication.”
Labor agencies “lie to [migrant workers about] the job they are going to do, the good salaries and all that. On arrival, you find something else,” he says.
Today, International Migrants Day, is a time to recognize that millions of migrant workers are trapped in conditions of forced labor and human trafficking. Some 150 million are migrant workers are among the 244 million migrants around the world, and like Wetindi, many have been lied to about the wages and working conditions they were promised by labor brokers.
The Solidarity Center and its partners around the world to create community and workplace-based safe migration and counter-trafficking strategies that emphasize prevention, protection and the rule of law. Most recently, the Solidarity Center and our partners in the Americas crafted a worker rights agenda for inclusion in the United Nations Global Compact on Safe, Regular and Orderly Migration.
