Credit: Kay Chernush
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.
When the employer of a migrant domestic worker takes her passport and refuses to return it if she seeks to leave, that is forced labor. When a family works at a brick kiln to pay off a debt, their children prevented from attending school, that is forced labor. When...
Millions of workers in the global economy have been disenfranchised from their rights, either tacitly or deliberately by governments, exacerbating “global inequality, poverty, violence and child and forced labor,” says Maina Kiai, United Nations Special Rapporteur on...
More than 80 countries have demonstrated they are “upholding their commitments to abolish forced labor and the worst forms of child labor,” according to U.S. Secretary of Labor Thomas Perez, in the Findings on the Worst Forms of Child Labor report released today. More...
A survey of garment workers in Sri Lanka, conducted in partnership with Solidarity Center and IndustriALL, found employer opposition and harassment has limited their ability to form unions and address workplace rights violations such as increased workloads and work...
An alarming 57.5 percent of women workers interviewed across all sectors for this Nigeria Labor Congress (NLC) report say they experienced gender-based violence and harassment (GBVH) in the world of work. More than one-third of respondents said that even when...
Where unions establish collective bargaining, they initiate the strongest mechanism for protecting agricultural workers’ rights, health and dignity. Through analysis of five agribusiness sectors—including palm oil in Colombia, bananas in Guatemala, strawberries in...
As a new wave of COVID-19 hits Cambodia, a new study recommends urgent action to ensure garment and tourism workers workers do not experience widespread loss of jobs and wages as they did in 2020. The Center for Policy Studies survey is supported by Solidarity Center...
Women working in South Africa's mining sector report being subject to sexual and gender-based violence and harassment, inside mines and within the mining communities where they live and efforts to redress such abuse must address the nature of the workplace and...
The governments of Mexico and the United States have supported the growth of the Mexican berry sector by creating conditions for a cheap supply of labor and profit growth. Mexican field workers receive an estimated 12 cents per pound of strawberries sold in U.S....
