Jobsite Improvements Can’t Happen without Workers

Jobsite Improvements Can’t Happen without Workers

The global economy generally is unregulated and the system encourages multinational corporations to operate or source from countries where wages are low, laws to protect human rights are few or unenforced and workers are impoverished and vulnerable, Shawna Bader-Blau, Solidarity Center executive director, said before the Canadian Parliament Monday.

“Unfortunately, the horrifying working conditions that led to the Rana Plaza collapse and the deadly Tazreen Fashions fire just six months prior are not unique to Bangladesh. In developing countries around the world, we see building codes go unenforced, and health and safety standards ignored,” Bader-Blau told the Senate Standing Committee on Human Rights.

The Canadian Senate committee held the hearing, “Corporate Social Responsibility and Garment Workers,” to monitor human rights issues and to review how the Canadian government addresses its international and national human rights obligations.

Bader-Blau emphasized that improving workplace conditions above all requires involving working people in the process—and that means workers must be able to form unions and bargain over their wages and working conditions with employers.

She recommended several steps to address the growing global crisis in which low wages, few jobs and exploitative working conditions increasingly becomes the norm. Governments “have important tools to improve human rights conditions for workers, including trade arrangements and legal requirements for accountability in supply chains,” she said.

Further, global corporations must support the human rights of their workers. As a start, global corporations should “fully embrace the United Nations guiding principles on business and human rights as a floor and aggressively move their implementation across the supply chain,” Bader-Blau said.

“Treat human rights with a level of priority you treat pricing and quality control. Global corporations have figured out how quality control can be maintained across their supply chain. How about worker rights?”

The bottom line, she said, is that no amount of legally unenforceable, nicely worded social-responsibility promises is ever going to resolve the abuses perpetuated on a vulnerable workforce.

“Rather, workers’ ability to organize and collectively raise concerns to management because they have the strength of a union is the only realistic approach to ensuring that they know and can exercise their rights. Without a union, individuals who complain can be threatened, fired or even killed into silence. Together, they are a force for improvement.”

Others testifying before the committee included Shannon Brown, Fairtrade Canada Business Development and Commercial Relations director; Sofia Molina, Fairtrade Canada category specialist for coffee; and Bob Jeffcott, co-founder and policy analyst for the Maquila Solidarity Network.

See Bader-Blau’s full testimony, starting at 77:55.

 

Economic Growth without Jobs Fuels Migration

Economic Growth without Jobs Fuels Migration

Migration.Labor Migration and Inclusive Growth cover.2015Governments of migrants’ countries of origin could be doing much more to harness the phenomenon of labor migration toward inclusive growth, according to a new report that investigated high-migration communities in Indonesia.

The study, which examined the role of labor migration in achieving the aims of an inclusive growth agenda in origin countries, looked at communities in West Nusa Tenggara, the Indonesian province that sends the highest ratio of its population for overseas work. It found that wages sent home by Indonesians who migrate for work are not supporting local job creation in origin communities. Further, it finds that the poorest communities in Indonesia are most likely to send migrants into informal economy jobs.

“Remittance capital (the money sent home by migrant workers) has not stimulated broad-based economic development complete with an increase in job opportunities … in spite of migration from these localities of more than 30 years,” the report states. As a result, “community members cannot envision a future in which the demand to migrate has ceased.”

Labor Migration and Inclusive Growth: Toward Creating Employment in Origin Communities” also found that Indonesian workers’ main incentive for migrating out of the country is not dire poverty nor lack of jobs at home but a lack of just jobs—those that provide a stable salary and opportunities for economic mobility.

While Indonesia is facilitating a slow transition in its overseas workforce from informal economy work to jobs in the formal economy, migrants from West Nusa Tenggara, who are among the poorest and primarily women, still have few options except jobs as domestic workers. The uneven pattern of international migration across the country is a result of inequitable access to education, training and capital across regions at home.

While Indonesia is facilitating a slow transition in its overseas workforce from informal economy work to jobs in the formal economy, migrants from West Nusa Tenggara, who are among the poorest, are primarily women and still wind up in jobs as This uneven pattern of international migration across the country is a result of uneven access to education, training and capital across regions at home.

“The [Indonesian] government sees return migrants primarily as consumers rather than producers. Moreover, it values remittances more for their ability to improve Indonesia’s balance of payments and reduce foreign exchange shortages, rather than for their potential to serve as start-up capital for job-creating enterprises,” the report notes.

The report concludes that an “economic growth agenda in countries like Indonesia that does not entail a roadmap for creating employment opportunities in communities of origin lacks inclusivity.”

JustJobs Network produced the report, supported by the Solidarity Center with U.S. Agency for International Development funding. The report is part of the Center’s Transformation of Work research series, which is designed to expand scholarship on and understanding of issues facing workers in an increasingly globalized world, and supports the efforts of the Solidarity Center and its partners to document challenges to decent work and the strategies workers and their organizations engage to overcome those challenges.

See all Solidarity Center-supported reports on migration.

Worker Rights Worst in Belarus, Middle East-North Africa

Worker Rights Worst in Belarus, Middle East-North Africa

Belarus, China and Colombia are countries with the worst worker rights violations in the world, while the Middle East and North Africa is the world’s worst region when it comes to fundamental rights at work, according to the 2015 Global Rights Index released today.

“Workers in Colombia and Guatemala have been murdered for trying to negotiate better working conditions, while in Qatar and Saudi Arabia migrants continue to endure forced labor and labor law exclusions which amount to modern slavery,” says Sharan Burrow, general secretary of the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC), which issued the report. Union members were murdered in 11 countries, an increase of one from the last report, including 22 deaths in Colombia alone.

The other top 10 worst countries for working people are Egypt, Guatemala, Pakistan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Swaziland and United Arab Emirates.

“In 73 of 141 countries, workers faced dismissals, suspensions, pay cuts and demotions for attempting to negotiate better working conditions, while in 84 countries employers adopted illegal strategies to deny or delay bargaining with representative trade unions,” says Burrow.

The report notes a worrying trend in the “immense increase in the number of arbitrary arrests and detentions of workers for exercising their rights in a legitimate and peaceful manner” with the number of countries where such violations were reported rising from 35 in 2013–2014 to 44 in 2014–2015 and now includes countries such as Spain and Brazil.

The Index ranks countries based on the frequency with which worker rights are violated, and finds that worker rights in eight countries have diminished since last year: Burundi, Dominican Republic, Hong Kong, Special Administrative Region of China, Iran, Georgia, Russia, United Kingdom and Spain.

Five countries received perfect scores: Austria, Finland, Netherlands, Norway and Uruguay. The report finds that two countries, Mozambique and Lesotho, have made notable improvements.

“The World’s Worst Countries for Workers” also finds:

  • In nearly 60 percent of the 141 countries ranked, certain categories of workers are excluded from fundamental labor rights.
  • 70 percent of countries deny the right to strike to some or all workers.
  • Two-thirds of countries deny workers collective bargaining rights.
  • More than half of countries in the survey deny workers access to the rule of law.

The report, which the ITUC has issued annually for the past 30 years, connects deteriorating worker rights and inability to freely form unions with the world’s increasing global economic inequality, where more than 1.2 billion people live in extreme poverty.

Download the full report, which includes a country-by-country description, maps and graphics.

Cambodia’s Draft Union Law ‘A Major Step Backward’

Cambodia’s Draft Union Law ‘A Major Step Backward’

Cambodia’s draft trade union law would violate the right to organize and be a major step backward for workers, Human Rights Watch said yesterday in a letter to Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen.

The Cambodian government has told the media that the trade union law will be enacted in 2015, but has not made a draft public nor provided opportunities for feedback from workers, unions or the public.

Solidarity Center Cambodia Program Director David Welsh says he has seen the draft law, and it does not serve the interests or unions or workers.

“New labor laws and trade union laws were supposed to expand and protect the rights of workers and the freedom of trade unions, not circumscribe them in the way that this current draft law’s doing,” Welsh says. The Solidarity Center has long raised the need for a new trade union law that is grounded in strong worker protections based on internationally accepted standards.

“If the government doesn’t change track, it will be extremely damaging going forward for the reputation of Cambodia as an investment country, and as a viable garment sector as well.”

Trafficked Boat Victim: ‘I Survived by Eating Leaves’

Trafficked Boat Victim: ‘I Survived by Eating Leaves’

Bangladesh.Trafficking human chain._Selina Begum, 60, whose son is still missing, holding a placard saying hang trafficking traders.6.15.Mushfique Wadud

Selina Begum’s son has been missing at sea since he migrated for work. Credit: Solidarity Center/Mushfique Wadud

Selina Begum, 60, traveled from Bangladesh’s northeast Narshindi district to Dhaka, the capital, for one reason, she says: “I want to know the whereabouts of my son.”

Selina’s son, Taizul Islam Rakib, 22, is among the thousands of workers and their families who have migrated overseas to find jobs. Selina says she glimpsed her son in a television news story on the plight of migrants abandoned on boats, but has not heard from him.

Over the weekend, Selina joined dozens of those with missing loved ones in a human chain in downtown Dhaka, where they carried signs, “Punish the trafficking traders,” and held a press conference demanding the government take action. They were joined by repatriated victims of human trafficking like Abdur Rahman, 40, who was rescued from Malaysia and returned to Bangladesh.

“I did not get anything to eat for 22 days and just survived by eating tree leaves,” Abdur said, describing his journey to Malaysia.” “I never thought I would survive.”

Fulmoti, 35, has been waiting for a phone call from her husband Faruk Hossain, 40, who set out for Malaysia by sea on April 14. “My morning starts with the hope that my husband would phone me, but every night I go to bed feeling hopeless,” says Fulmoti, a mother of two.

The event was organized by 19 labor and human rights organizations, including the Solidarity Center and its allies, the Bangladesh Center for Workers Solidarity (BCWS), the Bangladesh Garment and Industrial Workers Federation (BGIWF) and the Bangladesh Independent Garment Workers Union Federation (BIGUF). The coalition issued a joint statement urging governments in origin and destination countries to take immediate action to repatriate migrants and punish traffickers.

Speaking at the event, Syed Saiful Haque, chairman of WARBE Development Foundation, a Bangladesh emigrant rights group, said that the immediate repatriation of trafficking victims should be governments’ first priority. In addition, said Syed Sultan Uddin Ahmmed, assistant executive director of the Bangladesh Institute of Labor Studies, the government must take action against the leaders of trafficking chains.

The event stems from a decision by members of WARBE, the Bangladeshi Ovhibashi Mohila Sramik Association (BOMSA) and Solidarity Center to work together in raising the issue of  trafficked migrants. The group is asking the Bangladesh government to take steps to repatriate trafficking victims and rehabilitate them; demanding prosecution of traffickers; and urging the government to work with other concerned governments to prevent stop criminal trafficking.

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