Sabina, a domestic worker from Bangladesh, has worked in Jordan for the past eight years, sending money home each month to her mother, sister and 11-year-old son who rely on her to survive. But with the COVID-19 crisis, she has been out of work for more than a month....
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.
Stepping into the Breach: Unions Provide Key Aid in COVID-19
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...
Morocco Hospitality Workers Stand Strong in Pandemic
Unions throughout Morocco are negotiating wage guarantees and other measures to safeguard the livelihoods of the tens of thousands of workers in the country’s hospitality industry—cooks, wait staff, hotel cleaners, tour operators—who have been furloughed or lost their...
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...