In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, millions of migrant workers have been forced to return to their homes or are languishing in their destination countries without jobs, and Nepali migrant workers are no exception. In 2019, Nepal’s Department of Foreign Employment...
Labor migration feeds the global economy. Hundreds of millions of migrant workers worldwide generate billions of dollars in global remittances. They are domestic workers, construction and agricultural workers, factory and service workers, teachers and professionals. Migrant workers often travel long distances due to a lack of decent work at home to support their families and build a better life. They frequently are denied the most basic human rights. For instance, most destination countries deny migrant workers the right to form unions, and explicitly exclude them from labor law protections, and women migrant workers are often subject to gender-based violence and harassment in their workplaces.
The Solidarity Center strives for worker rights for people on the move by ensuring migrant worker rights are a key part of the labor movement. We cultivate an understanding of how exploitative labor migration management schemes are a widespread means by which to undercut worker wages, create precarious work and pit workers against each other. And, in addressing these structural ills, we emphasize a response that understands the intersectionalities and identities that make migrant workers especially vulnerable. Our goal is to ensure that migrant workers are fully able to exercise their workplace rights, as well as their social, economic and democratic rights.
We also focus on the creation of decent work in home countries so workers can migrate by choice and not due to economic coercion. We recognize that migration is not caused by a single factor that “pushes” workers to migrate. In doing so, we bring our unique worker rights voice more broadly by emphasizing that everyone deserves dignity at work regardless of status—climate migrants, economic migrants and conflict refugees. We work to achieve this through programs that focus on union organizing and collective bargaining, policy advocacy, access to justice, safe migration and, more broadly, the ability to exercise fundamental freedoms as democratic participants.
Find out more
- A Pandemic Reset for Migrant Workers, Neha Misra and Shannon Lederer
- How COVID-19 Affects Women in Migration, Carolina Gottardo and Paola Cyment
[News 18: India] Mission Houses in Gulf Nations Should Record Indian Workers’ Wage Grievances Before Repatriation, Says Tharoor
Neha Misra, senior migration specialist for the Solidarity Center, said lack of freedom of association for migrant workers is leading to wage theft.
Migrant Workers Essential Workers Not Only in COVID-19
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....
RECOGNISING THE ILO FUNDAMENTAL LABOUR RIGHTS AT THE WTO: A CALL FOR AN AUTHORITATIVE INTERPRETATION
This memo explains that under current WTO law, the ILO fundamental labor rights should already be protected under the ‘public morals’ clauses of the WTO’s General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS). Download it...
WTO Law Aspects of Import Prohibitions on Products and Services Made Using Forced Labour
All states are obliged under international law to eradicate forced labour within their own territories. However, these obligations do not require states to eradicate forced labour in other states. At most, states are obliged to cooperate with each other to this end....
The Persistence of Private Power: Sacrificing Rights for Wages (South Africa)
"The Persistence of Private Power: Sacrificing Rights for Wages," a qualitative survey of human rights violations against live-in domestic workers in South Africa, is co-published by IZWI Domestic Workers Alliance—a network of domestic workers in Johannesburg that...
DERECHOS DESCONECTADOS: MIRADA AL TELETRABAJO EN AMÉRICA LATINA
The ILAW Network, in partnership with the Friedrich Ebert Foundation (FES) “Toma Partido” project, analyzes existing legal frameworks on telework in Latin America, whether adopted before or during the pandemic. Download it here.
2021 Annual Report
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Migrant Workers’ Access to Justice for Wage Theft: A Global Study of Promising Initiatives
The report identifies initiatives from around the world that enable migrant workers to obtain redress for wage theft through administrative and judicial mechanisms. These initiatives shift risks and burdens of wage recovery away from workers and onto government and...