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.
More than four out of five people (81 percent) in the global workforce of 3.3 billion are currently affected by full or partial workplace closures due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Some 1.25 billion workers are employed in the sectors identified as being at high risk of...
Just as the magnitude of the COVID-19 pandemic highlights the massive global economic and social inequality around the world, with workers in the informal economy and supply chains, and migrant workers—many of whom are women—especially marginalized, so, too, does it...
Through individual case studies and legal analysis, When the Job Hurts demonstrates the need for domestic workers in South Africa to receive the same coverage under the country's job safety and health compensation law as other workers. Download report.