Apr 19, 2024
A regional health care rights campaign led by the Organization of Trade Unions of West Africa (OTUWA) saw some success in Nigeria this month, where the federal government announced a disbursement of almost $70 million to bolster the country’s health infrastructure.
The funds will be delivered through the country’s Basic Health Care Provision Fund, which delivers essential but often out-of-reach health care service to Nigeria’s citizens–more than 90 percent of whom work uncertain, poorly paid informal jobs.
“We celebrate with our Nigerian partners and will continue to support unions that are demanding more investment by governments in the health of their citizens,” says Solidarity Center Africa Regional Program Director Christopher Johnson.
In Nigeria, where out-of-pocket health care payments were reportedly among the highest in the world in 2023, the campaign is supported by the International Federation of Women Lawyers (FIDA), the Medical and Health Workers Union of Nigeria (MHWUN), the National Association of Nigeria Nurses and Midwives (NANNM) and labor federations Nigeria Labor Congress (NLC) and Trade Union Congress of Nigeria (TUC).
In the region, OTUWA’s “Health Care Is a Human Right” campaign is supported by OTUWA’s affiliates together with many of their health-sector unions. A 2020 survey of 700 health workers living in Gambia, Ghana, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone and Togo provides a window into the region’s health-sector shortcomings and presents a raft of recommendations for ensuring the protection of health worker rights and effective, accessible health care for all.
OTUWA’s “Health Care Is a Human Right” campaign, launched in Abuja in March 2021, unites OTUWA affiliates in a fight for equal and fair health care access for all who live within the ECOWAS region. The campaign includes collection of health data and advocacy with national and continent-wide African Union legislators and policymakers.
The region’s signatory governments are required by ECOWAS Fundamental Principles to promote and protect human rights in accordance with the African Union (AU) Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights—including provision of social protections such as health care.
Like many other African countries, Nigeria’s government is struggling to provide essential services to its citizens in the context of mounting national debt and illicit financial flows. Curbing multinational tax dodging, government corruption and other criminal activity is essential, say unions, because doing so could cut by almost half the $200 billion annual financing gap for achieving the UN Sustainable Development Goals, according to the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD). The 2023 SDG report noted that 381 million people, or almost 5 percent of the world’s population, were pushed into extreme poverty in 2019 by out-of-pocket health expenditures.
OTUWA represents trade union national centers in the 15 West African countries comprising the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS).
Apr 18, 2024
Marking this year’s Earth Day, the Solidarity Center is launching a new video about Bangladesh tannery workers’ campaign for safer, healthier and greener jobs. Available in English and Bangla, the video provides a window into one of the country’s most dangerous jobs and demonstrates how the tannery sector sits at the intersection of the worker rights and environmental justice movements.
Bangladesh’s leather sector, which satisfies one-tenth of world demand and whose exports of leather and leather goods totaled $1.1 billion in 2022, profits from a model that relies on low wages, lax workplace safety and unchecked environmental degradation. Its processes involve a stew of dangerous chemicals and heavy metals. Left untreated or flushed into waterways or surrounding areas, as happened in Hazaribagh, Dhaka, for decades, these substances pollute the environment, sicken workers and the local population, contaminate the air and water sources, and make food production dangerous. In Savar Tannery Industrial Estate in Hemayetpur—to which the government in 2017 ordered approximately 25,000 tannery workers and their families to move amid increasing international pressure regarding Hazaribagh’s toxic environmental and working conditions—factory sludge and effluents are not being effectively treated and new environmental threats are being created.
Meanwhile Bangladesh is one of the most acutely climate-impacted countries, with cyclones, flooding and extreme heat increasingly common. Around the world and in Bangladesh, climate change hits the poorest and most marginalized communities hardest. Worsening climate change, combined with environmental degradation in the workplace and surrounding communities, have compounding impacts on workers and their families.
A recent Solidarity Center survey of tannery workers living in Hemayetpur illustrates how the impact of industrial pollution, harsh working conditions and low wages is leaving workers, their families and their communities increasingly vulnerable to serious health issues and more frequent climate-related shocks in the country.
Workers said they have suffered exposure to fire or electric shock, falling, cutting, broken bones, heavy objects falling on them, contact with acid or chemicals, and inhalation of chemical fumes or gas. Health issues diminish workers’ earnings—which workers said were insufficient for covering basic needs. At the same time, costs have skyrocketed, including for transportation, which is made more challenging when regular waterlogging and flooding make roads impassable.
Local communities have reported that they are afraid or unable to grow food or catch fish, and note that just breathing the polluted air is enough to ruin their appetite. Poor water quality, meanwhile, adds to the burden of women’s care work, and more women than men mentioned now having to spend more time collecting water and doing so from greater distances.
“We used to cook with the water of [the] river. I used to bathe in the river. But we cannot do anything with the river water now,” a woman community member affected by the Savar Tannery Industrial Estate told the Solidarity Center last year.
With Workers, Toward a Safer, Greener, More Fair Industry
Because workers best understand the hazards and solutions to improving their jobs—and how they and their families are most disproportionately impacted by the health consequences of environmental degradation—workers are demanding inclusion in industry decision-making and wage-setting processes.
The Solidarity Center partners in Bangladesh with the Tannery Workers Union (TWU) representing those who—like others in Bangladesh and around the world—are suffering geographic displacement and other climate change consequences, as well as environmental degradation at work and in their communities.
Apr 17, 2024
In a first for Ukraine, in-home childcare workers including nannies and babysitters organized and then elected domestic worker Tetiana Lauhina to head their new labor organization, Union of Home Staff (UHS).
“[My colleagues] are amazingly hard-working and well-educated. I want all of them to be recognized as workers and officially protected,” says Lauhina in a video interview.
The Union of Home Staff (UHS), formed by 17 domestic worker activists, will vigorously advocate with Ukraine’s lawmakers and government to ensure protections for domestic workers and formalization as workers under the country’s labor law.
As an outgrowth of nongovernmental organization Union of Home Staff (UHS), the new union will continue to use its allied organization’s name and acronym, UHS, expanding its services as an information hub and community center, including for its 1,800 Facebook members.
Ukraine’s first nationwide survey of domestic workers last year found that working without contracts and formal recognition had left most survey respondents victims of low pay, wage theft, confusion about employment status, exclusion from the country’s pension system and minimal capacity to exercise their right to freedom of association. And, without legal formalization as workers, Ukraine’s domestic workers lack access to care rights and services for themselves and their families—including maternity and child benefits, long-term care services and disability compensation for workers who die or are injured in their employers’ homes.
“[The domestic worker] is not secure and she is nobody for the state,” says Lauhina.
Because women account for three-quarters of the 75.6 million domestic workers globally, domestic worker rights are key to the achievement of gender equality. On International Women’s Day this year, the ILO issued a new policy brief urging governments and employers’ organizations to ensure that domestic workers have access to labor rights and social protections.
Nongovernmental organization UHS was formed in 2019 with support from Ukraine labor rights nongovernmental organization Labor Initiatives (LI) and the Solidarity Center to raise awareness about labor rights challenges for Ukraine’s care economy workers and support the country’s legislative efforts to formalize domestic work.
Apr 15, 2024
In the face of intense pushback by exploitive global app-based companies operating in the Republic of Georgia—where workers are beholden to algorithmic whims to earn their uncertain livelihoods—unions are fighting for platform worker rights through advocacy campaigns, legal challenges and organizing drives.
“Solidarity and unity in protecting our rights are essential,” says Georgian Yandex and Bolt food-delivery app driver David Rochikashvili, who credits the Georgian Trade Unions Confederation (GTUC) with helping drivers like him file a Tbilisi City Court lawsuit demanding recognition of drivers’ employment relationship with Yandex and Bolt.
An International Lawyers Assisting Workers Network (ILAW Network) report—which analyzes 30 recent employment cases across 18 countries—found that app-based companies “go to extraordinary lengths to construct an impenetrable legal armory around themselves, requiring workers, unions and/or the state to overcome innumerable hurdles should they wish to impose any employment obligations on the companies acting as ‘employers.’”
People who are denied legal worker status are ineligible for the minimum wage, holiday or sick pay, social security contributions and worker rights protections afforded by national labor laws—including the right to safety on the job. By wrongly denying a direct employment relationship with app workers, app-based platform companies are growing their profits at workers’ expense and threatening decades of hard-won human and worker rights progress toward achieving decent work. Globally, unions are fighting back.
In Tbilisi—where the cost of living has risen dramatically, including rents that have more than doubled year over year—couriers for food delivery company Wolt in 2023 struck to protest a new remuneration system that couriers said would severely cut their earnings. Wolt owner DoorDash—having generated more than $100 billion in sales since inception—last year achieved second place on Forbes’s Midas List Europe.
Georgia’s transport and agricultural worker unions, among others, are stepping in to support rideshare and delivery workers’ organizing efforts across various platforms.
“Hundreds of platform workers have been organized and are collectively striving to improve their working conditions [in Georgia],” says GTUC Vice President Raisa Liparteliani.
The Solidarity Center’s ILAW Network is continuing to train Georgian Bar Association worker rights lawyers on how to protect delivery workers’ rights in the country’s courts, and is pursuing advocacy work with Georgian policymakers and legal experts through legal conferences that highlight app-worker rights and best practices. And, after Wolt courier Shakro Metrevelis’s case failed in a lower court, ILAW and the GTUC are appealing it in the Supreme Court of Georgia to advance Metrevelis’s groundbreaking effort to establish legal status as a Wolt LLC Georgia employee.
With union support, workers on digital platforms, through courts and legislation, are beginning to make significant gains, especially in Europe and Latin America. In a first for app-workers anywhere, European Union (EU) member states last month reached a provisional agreement on an EU platform work directive that includes a presumption of employment and rights on algorithmic management.
Apr 11, 2024
Just days before the Hotel Farah Casablanca closed for a yearlong renovation at the end of February, its union negotiated to ensure that workers would not be left without an income and could return to their positions when the hotel reopened.
The deal, known as a protocol agreement, struck by the National Federation of Hotel, Restaurants and Tourism (FNHRT), an affiliate of the Moroccan Workers Union (Union Marocaine du Travail, UMT), and the Barceló Group, the hotel’s new owner, guarantees that all 102 permanent workers will receive 79.5 percent of their salaries under $500 and 75 percent of salaries above $500 for a year plus 70 percent of the 13th month salary bonus.
The new agreement builds on an earlier deal, negotiated and signed with the previous owner prior to the sale to Barceló, which boosted pay between 7 percent and 12 percent and ensured smooth labor relations.
“If they hadn’t come to an agreement, they couldn’t have sold the property. They had to stabilize the situation with the workers,” said Hadira Afer, worker delegate.
She added that reaching the new agreement “was a struggle.” And while it did not include everything the workers wanted, it was still good for the staff and the union.
Al-Aji Muhammad, the head of the union office at the hotel, said “these marathons of negotiations were very challenging, prompting the union to fiercely defend workers’ rights. The first offer submitted by the employer to pay 50 percent of salaries was very disappointing to the union.‘’
Morocco is experiencing a tourism boom, especially in the leadup to the 2030 World Cup, which it will jointly host with Portugal and Spain. Hotels and other facilities across the country are under construction and renovation.
Apr 10, 2024
A solidarity action by more than 1,000 workers on the streets of Lusaka, Zambia, last month highlighted an Africa-wide, worker-led campaign to address the consequences of mounting government debt and illicit financial flows.
“It is necessary for Africa’s debt to be canceled to stop the bleeding of African economies,” said Rose Omamo, deputy president of the International Trade Union Confederation-Africa and IndustriALL vice president, who helped deliver a petition to Zambia Labor and Social Security Minister Brenda Tambatamba March 21, 2024. Solidarity Center partner ITUC-Africa represents 17 million working men and women in 52 African countries.
Citing ”grave concerns” about borrowing governments’ lack of transparency in securing, using and managing loans, ITUC-Africa is calling for official and private creditors to restructure Africa’s debt to protect citizens’ access to vital social protection services such as education, health, pensions, infrastructure, sanitation and water.
Social protection is a key driver in the achievement of Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) Vision 2050, which includes among its five pillars sustainable development and social inclusion. Indeed, the Organization of Trade Unions of West Africa (OTUWA) is spearheading a subregional “Healthcare Is A Human Right” campaign.
To further protect the continent’s citizens against resource grab, illicit financial flows—which include multinational tax dodging, government corruption and other criminal activity—must be curbed, say unions. Doing so could cut by almost half the $200 billion annual financing gap for achieving the UN Sustainable Development Goals, reports the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD).
An estimated $88.6 billion, equivalent to 3.7 percent of Africa’s GDP, is leaving the continent as illicit capital flight annually, according to UNCTAD’s Economic Development in Africa Report 2020.
