The Solidarity Center program in South Africa aims to improve the lives of working people, particularly the most vulnerable—farm workers, domestic workers, migrant workers and women workers. Credit: COSATU
In South Africa, the Solidarity Center aims to improve the lives of working people, particularly the most vulnerable—farm workers, domestic workers, migrant workers and women workers—who face long-standing barriers to sharing the country’s economic prosperity.
The Solidarity Center works closely with the 2 million-member Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) and the Federation of South Africa Trade Unions (FEDUSA).
With its union and worker organization partners, the Solidarity Center conducts gender equality training to help counter gender-based violence and harassment at work and enable workers, especially women workers, achieve their rights to maternity protection and workplaces free of sexual harassment and other forms of gender-based violence.
To help build stronger legal and social representation for the more than 1 million domestic workers in South Africa, the Solidarity Center works with the South African Domestic Service and Allied Workers Union (SADSAWU). The Solidarity Center helps SADSAWU improve its organizing outreach and holds exchanges between SADSAWU and U.S. domestic workers’ organizations.
Working with the Food and Allied Workers Union (FAWU), the Solidarity Center bolsters the union’s efforts to represent and assist migrant farm workers, whose jobs involve long hours, low pay and little room to assert their workplace rights.
Women working in South African mines “at times confront danger, violence and indignity in their work environments,” where gender-based violence and harassment (GBVH) appears both widespread and normalized, according to a new report from the Solidarity Center and South...
“Violence and harassment happens to all workers, irrespective of your gender,” says Brenda Modise, a union activist in South Africa. “It doesn't matter whether they are men and women, old young LGBTQI community or anyone, but we are addressing violence and harassment...
In an historic judgment, the South African Constitutional Court in mid-November recognized that injury and illness arising from work as a domestic worker in a private home is no different to that occurring in other workplaces and equally deserving of compensation....