Delivery employees in Colombia who work for the online platform Rappi joined protests across Latin America today calling for decent wages, job safety and health protections for gig economy workers. Largely migrant workers from Venezuela, they provide essential...
Some 2 billion people work in the informal sector as domestic workers, taxi drivers, and street vendors, many of them women workers. Informal economy work now comprises the majority of jobs in many countries and is increasing worldwide. Although informal economy workers can create up to half of a country’s gross national product, most have no access to health care, sick leave or support when they lose their jobs, and they have little power to advocate for living wages and safe and secure work.
The Solidarity Center is part of a broad-based movement in dozens of countries to help workers in the informal economy come together to assert their rights and raise living standards. For instance, three affiliates of the Central Organization of Trade Unions-Kenya (COTU-K), a Solidarity Center partner, signed agreements with informal worker associations to unionize the workers, enabling them to access to the country’s legal protections for formal-sector employees.
Find out more about informal workers gaining power by joining together in unions and worker associations in this Solidarity Center-supported publication, Informal Workers and Collective Action: A Global Perspective.
Domestic Workers Left out in the Cold
Domestic workers—at great risk during the pandemic crisis—are mobilizing to secure rapid relief and protection says the International Domestic Workers Federation (IDWF). This International Domestic Workers Day, more than 60 million of the world’s estimated 67 million...
‘Hunger or the Virus’: COVID-19 & Informal Workers
Among the world’s most vulnerable workers are those marginalized within their economies and societies, namely the women and labor migrants who predominate in the informal economy, where they perform valuable work in low-wage jobs as janitors, domestic workers,...
Transforming Women’s Work: Policies for an Inclusive Economic Agenda
Convening experts from the AFL-CIO, the Rutgers University Center for Women’s Global Leadership and the Solidarity Center, this report examines how to shift governments' policy priorities, create an enabling environment for social organizing and transform women’s...
Putting Union Gender Equality Policy into Practice in South Africa
Unions are key drivers advancing gender equality. Yet in many countries around the world, there is a disconnect between labor union policy and practice in transforming gender inequalities within trade unions. Through the lens of the South African union movement, this...
Annual Report 2014
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Labor Migration and Inclusive Growth: Toward Creating Employment in Origin Communities (2015)
This paper investigates the intersection of labor migration and the inclusive growth agenda, and seeks to recommend policies so governments of origin countries can, in part, expand labor migration’s positive impacts by making migrant workers agents in promoting and...
Roles for Workers and Unions in Regulating Labor Recruitment in Mexico (2015)
Fordham University law professor Jennifer Gordon examines the roles of guest workers as organizers, monitors and policy-setters in supply chain initiatives and other efforts to address labor recruitment violations. Download here.
International Labor Migration: Re-regulating the Private Power of Labor Brokers (2015)
In this review of initiatives to regulate labor brokers, the authors find that state and civil society efforts to address migrant worker exploitation point to potential new policies, most effectively led by state-backed regulatory frameworks. Download here.