The Solidarity Center is sickened and saddened by the senseless bombings that killed and injured hundreds of people Easter Sunday in Sri Lanka. The organization, which works throughout the country and the world with workers across ethnic and religious lines, deplores the use of violence and offers its deepest condolences to the victims’ families and… [READ MORE]
Union members in Colombo, Sri Lanka, successfully lobbied for a safer workplace by convincing their company to improve policy guidelines to help prevent gender-based violations in the workplace. The effort was inspired by a Solidarity Center awareness-raising training in December on gender-based violence at work in which four workers from the South Asia Gateway Terminal… [READ MORE]
Some 400 workers at a factory in Sri Lanka have been on strike for more than two months, and two workers are waging a hunger strike to protest the firing of five union leaders. Workers say women have been subject to sexual abuse and other forms of gender-based violence at work, yet management is protecting… [READ MORE]
Just outside Sri Lanka’s Bandaranaike International Airport, where more than 2 million tourists start their vacations each year, a different reality unfolds in the Katunayake export processing zone (EPZ). There, thousands of garment workers take their places in factories guarded by electrified fencing to begin long days for little pay, forced to endure grueling production… [READ MORE]
Nearly 50 cleaning-sector employees from offices throughout Jaffna, Sri Lanka, discussed strategies for addressing gender-based violence at work and how unions can be instrumental in empowering workers to tackle the problem during a recent Solidarity Center training. The 28 women and 18 men who provide cleaning services for courts, banks and finance companies began the… [READ MORE]
The 2009 end of Sri Lanka’s civil war was an opportunity for workers to return to the security and protections of the formal economy, which had been destabilized by 26 years of violence. However, a new Solidarity Center survey finds that peace has yet to bring the hoped-for economic gains to workers in Jaffna, the… [READ MORE]
In Sri Lanka, where the union movement faces challenges familiar to many union activists around the world—a shift from industrial to service jobs and a related decline in union membership—strategic online outreach is drawing young workers and expanding union membership. Launched in 2013, the website Wedabima (“workflow” in Sinhalese), offers an interactive platform for workers… [READ MORE]
Update, November 21, 2013—Hundreds of striking workers at Ansell Lanka marched to the Australian High Commission office yesterday, the 40th day of the strike at the manufacturing plant. Workers sought a response to the union’s request for the office to help achieve a resolution. You can take action: Tell Ansell CEO and managing director to negotiate with… [READ MORE]
At age 22, N. Naga Durga Bhavani left her small village in India for Bahrain, where she hoped a job as a domestic worker would help pay for her young daughter’s heart surgery. But when she arrived, after paying labor recruiters the equivalent of nearly two months’ wages, she says her passport and papers were… [READ MORE]
With no other option to support her family in her native Sri Lanka, Nalani Samarasinghe, 41, has moved to Qatar three times for jobs ranging from 11 months to three years. At her last job as a domestic worker, she was expected to work between 5 a.m. and 1 a.m. daily with no holidays. In… [READ MORE]
