Even as trade union representatives from Tunisia and other trade unionists were barred from entering Bahrain to attend the General Federation of Bahrain Trade Unions (GFBTU) Congress, hundreds of union members participated in open, spirited discussions and held free elections, capped by the secretary-general’s call for continuing the democratic process.
“It is time for the democracy you and I believe in, and are called to implement, to take its course—the democracy that we have made a symbol and principle,” said GFBTU General Secretary Sayed Salman Al-Mahfood.
Mahfood, who stepped down along with three leaders who helped found the federation in 2004, said democracy means “leaving while enjoying the capacity to give.”
Four women are among the 15 newly elected members of GFBTU’s secretariat.
Although Bahrain still lacks democratic practices, GFBTU has presented an alternative with its March 5-7 Congress as an example.
“What I saw was a living example of democratic practices that included thousands of workers in Bahrain,” says Nader Tadros, Solidarity Center Regional Program Director for the Middle East and North Africa.
The Uzbekistan government again forced more than 1 million teachers, nurses and others to pick cotton for weeks during last fall’s harvest. But this time, the government went to extreme measures—including jailing and physically abusing those independently monitoring the process—to cover up its actions, according to a new report.
“The government unleashed an unprecedented campaign of harassment and persecution against independent monitors to attempt to cover up its use of forced labor while taking pains to make widespread, massive forced mobilization appear voluntary,” according to The Cover-Up: Whitewashing Uzbekistan’s White Gold.
Further, Uzbek officials in some cases forced teachers, students and medical workers to sign statements attesting that they picked cotton of their own will and agreeing to disciplinary measures, including being fired or expelled, if they failed to pick cotton. It instructed people to lie to monitors saying they came to pick cotton of their own volition.
Roughly 1 million teachers, nurses and other workers are forced each year to toil in Uzbekistan’s cotton fields. Credit: Uzbek-German Foundation
Covering Up for Cash Uzbekistan, which gets an estimated $1 billion per year in revenue from cotton sales, faced high penalties for not addressing its ongoing forced labor. But rather than end the practice, the government sought to cover it up, according to the report, produced by the Uzbek-German Forum for Human Rights.
The World Bank has invested more than $500 million in Uzbekistan’s agricultural sector. Following a complaint from Uzbek civil society, the bank attached loan covenants stipulating that the loans could be stopped and subject to repayment if forced or child labor was detected in project areas by monitors from the International Labor Organization (ILO), contracted by the World Bank to carry out labor monitoring during the harvest.
Last week, the Cotton Campaign, a coalition of labor and human rights groups that includes the Solidarity Center, presented a petition signed by more than 140,000 people from around the world to World Bank President Dr. Jim Yong Kim, calling on the bank to suspend lending to the agriculture sector in Uzbekistan until the Uzbek government changes its policy of forced labor in the cotton industry.
Farmers and business owners also were coerced by the government, the report found. Farmers are forced to plant state-ordered acreage of cotton and wheat or face the loss of their land. In 2015 the government relied on law enforcement to monitor and control the agricultural process and instill fear in farmers. Police regularly patrolled cotton fields, inspected farms and monitored workers and the harvest progress.
Officials and business owners, under pressure to support the national cotton harvest plan, ordered 40 percent or more of their employees to pick cotton, often in written directives.
Elena Urlaeva (right), was arrested at least four times and physically abused in prison for her work monitoring forced labor practices in Uzbekistan. Credit: Uzbek-German Forum
Physically Abused in Prison Among independent monitors harassed by the Uzbek government, long-time human rights and civic activist, Elena Urlaeva, was arrested at least four times during the 2015 cotton harvest as well as twice during the spring planting and weeding season.
The head of the Tashkent-based Human Rights Alliance of Uzbekistan, Urlaeva reported that she was injected with sedatives, stripped searched and forced to go without sanitation facilities during one incarceration last year. Another time, Urlaeva, her husband, their 11-year-old son and a family friend and farmer who had invited them to stay on his land were arrested because Urlaeva “photographed the fields without permission.”
For years, the Uzbekistan government has forced health care workers, teachers and others to pick cotton for 15 to 40 days, working long hours and enduring abysmal living conditions, including overcrowding and insufficient access to safe drinking water and hygiene facilities.
From domestic workers in New York City to garment workers in Bangladesh, women coming together to organize, demand fair treatment and address gender discrimination is critical to realizing women’s rights and economic justice. A new report from the AFL-CIO, the Rutgers Center for Women’s Global Leadership and the AFL-CIO Solidarity Center, Transforming Women’s Work: Policies for an Inclusive Economic Agenda, discusses the critical need to create an enabling environment for worker and community organizing, including inclusive macroeconomic and trade policies that promote decent work in the market and realign gender inequities in unpaid work in the home.
Economic policy is a critical tool that can promote or hinder gender equality and broadly shared growth. Traditional macroeconomic and trade policies have ignored or reinforced the structural barriers that impact women’s ability to compete fairly in the labor market, including the gender wage gap, occupational segregation and the disproportionate burden of unpaid work. While gender inequality is linked to reduced, less sustainable growth in the long term, the myopic focus on short-term growth—and the assumption that human rights will naturally follow—carries an inherent gender bias, as certain forms of gender inequality, particularly wage gaps between men and women driven by stereotypes of women workers as a cheap, expendable labor force, can temporarily create higher growth.
In her life and in her death at the hands of assassins this week, Berta Cáceres, a leader in Honduran struggles for social justice, exemplifies the difficult choices that so many Central American communities have faced over the past 40 years. When the region was torn by Cold War struggles and civil war, Cáceres’ family gave shelter and support to those fleeing the violence in El Salvador. As a tenuous peace was achieved, and many Hondurans faced poverty and violations of their rights, she went on to study and emerged as a leader for the rights of the Lenca people to stay on their land and sustain their rural communities, rather than migrate to cities that have become some of the most violent in the world or to the United States seeking safety and opportunity for decent work and better lives for their children.
Cáceres chose to stay in Honduras and, for more than 20 years, led the Council of Indigenous and Popular Organizations of Honduras, the organization she and other students founded to defend the rights, land and interests of the Lenca. She also chose to stay with her family and raise her four children in their community. In the aftermath of the 2009 coup, she stood out as a leader of the massive movement of Hondurans who rejected the removal of their democratically elected president and the violent repression that has characterized the Honduran government since the coup. Some 200 social, environmental and labor activists, and organized opposition party members have been killed since the coup.
Every day, Honduran workers face violations of their rights and labor laws by employers and inaction by the government. Commitments made to defend these rights in the Dominican Republic-Central American Free Trade Agreement remain unfulfilled, nearly four years after Honduran workers filed a formal complaint, along with the AFL-CIO.
While Cáceres and COPINH were recognized for their work by the Goldman Environmental Prize in 2015, the danger they face also was recognized by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, which granted her protective measures against the many threats Cáceres and her allies face in Honduras. In 2013, the IACHR denounced “the complete absence of the most basic measures to respond to grave violations of human rights” in Honduras.
The United States has a special responsibility to ensure the Honduran government fulfill its responsibilities. As part of its ongoing support to the post-coup governments, the United States must review the country’s compliance with human rights. As Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) noted this week, “The immediate question is what President [Juan Orlando] Hernández and his government—which has too often ignored or passively condoned attacks against Honduran social activists—will do to support an independent investigation, prosecution and punishment of those responsible for this despicable crime.”
The AFL-CIO joins many allied organizations in Honduras, elsewhere in Latin America and the United States, in sending our deepest condolences to the family, friends and community of Berta Cáceres, in denouncing her assassination and demanding a thorough investigation of those responsible for planning and executing her murder.
We also note that another leading activist, Gustavo Castro, was wounded during the assassination. As a key witness to the murder, he must be protected and given every opportunity to testify about this horrible crime.
In Burundi’s deepening political and human rights crisis, the government’s violent clampdown on civil society has left hundreds of people dead, jailed or disappeared, crushed free speech and independent media, and created a climate of fear where human and worker rights defenders have been forced into silence or exile.
Trade union members are among the hardest hit by the ongoing repression, which came to a head when President Pierre Nkurunziza announced a run for a third term in office last April. Leaders of the General Federation of Burundian Unions (COSYBU) currently living in Rwanda report that more than 700 union members have followed them into exile in the country. Many others are in jail or in hiding in Burundi. Still others have fled to other neighboring countries, leaving them largely out of touch with their organizations. Meanwhile, the Burundi government has closed the bank accounts of unions, hindering their ability to advocate for worker rights or support their members.
At a recent meeting in Kigali, Rwanda, the Solidarity Center met with dozens of exiled union members and leaders and representatives of nongovernmental organizations who told stories of fear and threats, economic intimidation and a long-term campaign to quiet dissent that preceded the protests of last spring.
“Teachers in Burundi have been one of the most oppressed categories of workers,” said a *member of the union for secondary school teachers, National Council of Personnel in Secondary Education (CONAPES), at the meeting. He said teachers had taken to the streets to protest unequal salaries among government workers prior to the announcement of the third term. However, “once you raised your voice for teachers’ rights, you were branded as against the government, arrested and put in jail.”
Most of the union’s leaders, he said, have been “chased out of their jobs and have had to flee the country.” He added, “Today, our union is dead. People are forced to keep silent.”
Market vendors relate similar tales. Members of the Merchants General Union (SYGECO) say they were systematically targeted with economic pressure, including usurious interest rates when they sought loans for their businesses, confiscation of their goods and onerous and sometimes arbitrary taxes. They, too, had organized protests against such discriminatory practices prior to the political unrest of 2015, including demands that the central market, which burned under mysterious circumstances in 2013, be rebuilt.
“One of the most depressing experiences was the burning of the market. It was our life,” said a SYGECO member who had sold fabric from her stall. “We tried to rebuild, but the government chased us everywhere we went,” adding that some 15 suburban markets where vendors tried to relocate also burned.
Now living without an income with her family in Rwanda and burdened with loans she cannot repay, the SYGECO member says the bank is going to sell her house in Burundi.
Refugees interviewed by the Solidarity Center are focused on trying to earn a living in their country of exile so they can take care of their families. Many living in Kigali are in apartments or shared quarters, though some expressed a resignation that they would move to refugee camps to save funds. They all maintain hope that they can return to a peaceful Burundi some day.
* Interviewees requested anonymity for fear of reprisals against family and friends still in Burundi.
This website uses cookies to improve your experience. We'll presume you're OK with this, but you can opt-out if you wish. Cookie settingsACCEPT
Privacy & Cookies Policy
Privacy Overview
This website uses cookies to improve your experience while you navigate through the website. Out of these cookies, the cookies that are categorized as necessary are stored on your browser as they are essential for the working of basic functionalities of the website. We also use third-party cookies that help us analyze and understand how you use this website. These cookies will be stored in your browser only with your consent. You also have the option to opt-out of these cookies. But opting out of some of these cookies may have an effect on your browsing experience.
Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. This category only includes cookies that ensures basic functionalities and security features of the website. These cookies do not store any personal information.
Any cookies that may not be particularly necessary for the website to function and is used specifically to collect user personal data via analytics, ads, other embedded contents are termed as non-necessary cookies. It is mandatory to procure user consent prior to running these cookies on your website.
