Unionized workers on Guatemala banana plantations earn more, work fewer hours, face less sexual harassment, and have safer workplaces, including during the Covid-19 pandemic, according to a Solidarity Center report. (The report also is available in Spanish.) “What...
The Solidarity Center engages with unions and their allies through an analysis and practice of equality, radical inclusion and intersectionality that is explicitly feminist, anti-racist, pro-equality, pro-worker, pro-migrant and class conscious.
The Solidarity Center designs and implements strategies to confront the multiple and intersecting forms of oppression that contribute to economic structures in which women and other groups of workers are devalued and excluded from economic and social equality. This requires a conscious effort to examine how oppressive forces play out throughout the global labor movement with a commitment to dismantle these systems. Explicit in this work is the understanding that the agency and leadership of the most marginalized workers are key components of decent work and economic justice for all.
The Solidarity Center has assisted unions and their allies in countries such as Cambodia, Colombia, Georgia, Honduras, Indonesia, Kyrgyzstan, Morocco, Nigeria, Nicaragua, South Africa and Tunisia to ensure meaningful participation of historically excluded and marginalized workers in unions and other democratic structures.
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In Morocco, the Solidarity Center supported a multi-year effort to build women worker power and gender equality which led to the inclusion of women workers during negotiations for the first collective bargaining agreement in the informal agriculture sector. In Colombia, the Solidarity Center supported the development of the first national organization dedicated to improving the working conditions of Afro-Colombians.
In Kyrgyzstan, Morocco and Tunisia, Solidarity Center is assisting in strengthening union efforts to promote inclusion of individuals with disabilities. In Nicaragua, Solidarity Center supports domestic workers as they address inclusion of LGBTQI union members to ensure they can represent themselves, articulate their priorities and increase their leadership opportunities and visibility.
The Solidarity Center:
- Conducts research and awareness-raising to challenge systems of oppression and inform inclusive approaches to building worker power across social identities at all levels
- Supports representative, inclusive leadership in our partner organizations
- Engages in cross-movement work to combat tools of oppression that impact women, including gender-based violence and harassment at work
- Brings together unions and community groups to identify shared socioeconomic struggles, analyzes how those struggles are linked to systemic racism and implements organizing, legal and advocacy strategies to collectively overcome the oppression that entraps workers in poverty
- Advocates for economic policies that uproot systemic discrimination and exploitation in labor markets.
Health and Safety: South African Domestic Workers No Longer Invisible
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....
New Tool for the Campaign to End Gender-Based Violence at Work
As union activists around the world urge their governments to ratify International Labor Organization Convention 190, the first global standard to address gender-based violence and harassment (GBVH) in the world of work, they also are educating and mobilizing members,...
The High Cost of Low Wages in Haiti Living Wage Estimate for Export Apparel Workers (April 2014)
Despite a 45 percent increase in apparel exports since the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, the women and men who sew T-shirts and jeans primarily destined for the U.S. market barely earn enough to pay for their lunch and transportation to work, a new Solidarity Center...
Asia Network: Empowering Workers, Creating Safe Workplaces
Millions of workers in Asia often risk their lives in unsafe and unhealthy workplaces. Through its network of more than 200 regional and national organizations in 14 Asian countries, including sector, national and global unions, ANROEV achieved concrete, worker-led...
Discrimination and Denationalization in the Dominican Republic
A September 2013 Dominican court ruling taking away citizenship from many migrants means they will be excluded from any activity that requires official identification, including working in the formal sector, attending school, opening a bank account, accessing health...
Labor Movement Responses to International Labor Migration in Sri Lanka
This report looks at the political and economic context within which Sri Lankan unions have attempted to respond to migrant workers, unions' role in the key governance and policy mechanisms that pertain to labor migration, and the way the Sri Lankan labor movement...
Restriction and Solidarity in the New South Africa
This report look at South African labor’s complicated engagement with migrant workers by examining the migration policy debate, labor’s response to the xenophobic attacks of 2008 and two organizing campaign in the agricultural sector. It sheds light on how labor...
Movements Wrestling and Emergent Solidarities: Labor Movement Responses to Migrant Workers
This report synthesizes a two-year project. Part one consisted of desk and case study research conducted by telephone in Jordan and the Dominican Republic looking into cases where unions had made significant changes in their approach to migrant worker organizing. Part...