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Millions of children are not in school today because they are forced to work. Children as young as 5 years old are part of the global workforce. In factories and in fields, children work up to 15 hours a day, seven days a week.
The Solidarity Center partners with unions around the world that are championing and negotiating economic benefits in the workplace which often enable adult workers to support their families without sending their children to work. Through collective bargaining with employers, unions also can bargain for worker access to schools or daycare facilities.
The Solidarity Center also joins with advocacy partners like the Child Labor Coalition and Global March Against Child Labor to champion legal and regulatory means to end child labor and with human rights organizations to address the structural conditions that lead to child labor. For instance, together with coalition partners in the Cotton Campaign, the Solidarity Center worked for an end to child labor in Uzbekistan’s cotton fields where government-run cotton harvests have forced citizens of all ages to toil each fall.
A recent study by NORC at the University of Chicago found that child labor in Ghana and Ivory Coast cocoa production increased 14 percent in less than a decade, demonstrating the urgent need for more effective and inclusive interventions, says the General Agricultural...
A survey conducted this year by the Kyrgyzstan Federation of Trade Unions (KFTU), including unions representing mining and construction workers, found that laws against child labor in the country are inadequate and implementation is uneven, resulting in more than...
The ILAW Network is pleased to present our new report, A Promised Not Realised: The Right to Non-Discrimination in Work and Employment – a collaboration of the ILAW Network and Equal Rights Trust (ERT). This issue brief focuses on two main questions: (1) why does...
In 2023, the Solidarity Center supported workers as they took on exploitative multinational companies and robot algorithms, demanded their governments tackle social ills and deliver on promises, and fought for justice in environments increasingly dangerous to those...
The ILAW Network is pleased to present our new report, Widespread Exploitation in the EU Road Transport Industry: The Case of Central Asian Truck Drivers, written by Imke van Gardingen and Edwin Atema of Road Transport Due Diligence (RTDD). This research was supported...
In South Africa, 98 percent of women garment and retail workers surveyed in 2022 said they had experienced one or more forms of gender-based violence or harassment, including physical abuse, unwanted sexual advances, psychological abuse, bullying and rape. To better...
In Bangladesh, 80 percent of women garment workers surveyed in 2019 reported they had experienced or witnessed sexual harassment, molestation or assault, endured extreme verbal abuse or witnessed a factory manager or supervisor abuse and harass other women in the...
It has been widely reported that when the COVID-19 pandemic began, governments and employers were ill-informed, ill-prepared and in many cases willing to risk the lives of workers for profits-leading to occupational health and safety failures globally. This issue...