Extortion and bribery fueled the forced labor behind Uzbekistan’s cotton harvest in autumn 2014, a coerced mass mobilization that took teachers, health care workers and millions of other employees away from their duties for several weeks, according to a report released today by the nonprofit Uzbek-German Forum for Human Rights.
While fewer children were pushed into the fields during the most recent harvest, the study found an unprecedented degree of extortion of individuals and businesses that included keeping people in fields even though there was no more cotton to pick so that workers had to continue to pay for room and board, and the setting of unattainable quotas so people had to pay to make up deficits.
“The Government’s Riches, the People’s Burden,” which builds on the Uzbek-German Forum’s preliminary findings last November, reports that the government mobilized more public employees in the 2014 harvest than in previous years, likely to make up for fewer child laborers. Uzbekistan has cut back on the use of child labor in the cotton fields, following worldwide condemnation—including by the U.S. State Department, which in October placed Uzbekistan among 12 countries with the worst forms of child labor.
“Students and the sick suffer during the harvest time,” says Nadejda Atayeva, president of the Association for Human Rights in Central Asia. “Schools and health clinics cannot function with so many staff sent to pick cotton. Students cannot receive the quality of education that they deserve, and medical care is inaccessible to people, even when they are very ill.”
At least 17 people died and numerous people were injured as a result of the cotton harvest and poor or unsafe working and living conditions, according to the report, which details how workers were forced to toil long hours picking cotton in unsafe and unhealthy working conditions that often included no access to clean drinking water. Workers were forced to live in garages, unused farm buildings or local schools in crowded and unsanitary conditions often without heat or hot water, even during cold weather at the end of the season.
The annual cotton harvest, estimated to exceed $1 billion, disappears into an extra-budgetary fund in the Finance Ministry to which only the highest-level officials have access, the report states.
“The enrichment of officials creates a powerful disincentive to enact real reforms of the cotton sector, and unlawful practices undermine the rule of law, nurturing an environment in which the government denies its use of forced labor and impunity prevails,” the report’s authors write.
The report concludes with specific recommendations for governments and nongovernmental organizations to address Uzbekistan’s abuses of human rights, including investigating and prosecuting companies that benefit from or contribute to the forced labor system of cotton production, which is in violation of international and national laws.
Experienced Uzbek-German Forum monitors, fluent in Uzbek, researched the cotton harvest and labor practices in the capital, Tashkent, and in six regions in Uzbekistan.
The Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU) will take to the streets in six cities on Saturday to protest economic stagnation and an increasingly repressive environment for workers, civil society activists and human rights defenders.
Over the years, the ZCTU has tracked the steady decline in the country’s economic situation and its widening informal economy—where more than 80 percent of Zimbabweans work for irregular pay or no pay at all. And it has decried the ever-dwindling number of formal jobs: down by nearly 10,000 positions in 2013 and more than 5,000 in 2014, according to its calculations.
As the economy sputters, the government is threatening to cut wages, pushing to gut the country’s labor laws and blaming workers for the country’s terrible economic situation.
The march will take place in an increasingly threatening environment for activists. Last month Itai Dzamara, a leading pro-democracy advocate, was abducted. He remains missing, and leading civil society organizations—including the ZCTU—are calling on the government to ascertain his whereabouts and prosecute his abductors.
Police in the cities of Bulawayo, Mutare and Masvingo initially refused to grant permission for the demonstrations, but reversed their decisions after the Harare police agreed to allow the demonstration there, according to the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC).
In 2010, an International Labor Organization (ILO) commission found serious government interference in ZCTU meetings and demonstrations in violation of ILO Convention 87 on freedom of association and Convention 98 on collective bargaining. The ITUC notes that while the government pledged to the ILO that police and security forces would receive training and education to prevent such violations in the future, the interference continues.
In Liberia, no new cases of Ebola have been reported in the past week and the overall death toll, while horrific at nearly 4,200, is far less than some health experts predicted last year—a result based in part on the coordinated efforts of the Liberian trade union movement.
Since September, Liberian union volunteers have provided Ebola awareness and preventative education to 75,843 workers and their families. In addition, volunteers have supplied 25,175 hand-washing buckets and soap to 48 workplaces and 63 communities in 13 counties, according to the Liberia Labor Congress.
The Congress also provided food to family members of Ebola victims who were quarantined, and donated 500 gallons of fuel to national and community radio stations, enabling them to step up Ebola education and awareness broadcasts for residents in remote areas inaccessible to volunteers.
“The fight against Ebola by the Liberian labor movement was crucial, as it was the first and only Ebola awareness program that directly reached and impacted on the lives of workers and their families, including community members,” says Liberia Labor Congress Secretary General David Sackoh.
The global labor movement assisted in funding the program, including the United Steelworkers in the United States and Canada and the Solidarity Center, which set up a fund for donations. Solidarity Center allies, the United Workers’ Union of Liberia (UWUL) and the Firestone Agricultural Workers Union of Liberia (FAWUL), took lead roles in the Ebola prevention and education efforts.
Last August, President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf appointed the Liberia Labor Congress as a member of the National Taskforce on Ebola, and shortly after, the Congress launched the Ebola Awareness Education and Preventive Measures at the Workplace and the Community Campaign.
The Congress, together with the nongovernmental organization, the Movement for Labor Rights and Justice, mapped targeted workplaces and communities where Ebola cases had been registered by the government and international organizations. The Congress and its unions then selected 75 volunteers from among local union leaders, shop stewards and shop-floor members to carry out the project.
The volunteers then took part in a week-long training at UWUL, and each was tasked to reach at least 200 people in eight communities, providing them with Ebola awareness and prevention education and hand-washing supplies.
Three years after the torture and murder of garment worker union leader Aminul Islam, his killers have not been brought to justice.
No one has been prosecuted for the torture and murder of garment worker union leader Aminul Islam.
The AFL-CIO and eight other global global labor rights organizations have written to Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina on the anniversary of his murder to demand his killers be located and prosecuted.
Aminul, 39, disappeared on April 4, 2012, and his body was found a few days later with signs of torture. He was a plant-level union leader at an export processing zone in Bangladesh, an organizer for the Bangladesh Center for Workers’ Solidarity (BCWS), and president of the Bangladesh Garment and Industrial Workers Federation’s (BGIWF) local committee in the Savar and Ashulia areas of Dhaka.
Despite international outcry, including a U.S. congressional hearing and then U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s call for justice in the case, Aminul’s murder has gone unsolved. He had sought to improve the working conditions of some 8,000 garment workers employed by Shanta Group, a garment manufacturer based in Dhaka.
After the United States revoked preferential trade benefits for Bangladesh in 2013, citing human and labor rights abuses, the Bangladesh government dropped criminal charges against two garment worker leaders who worked with him, and announced it would step up the search for the people responsible for his torture and murder. Instead, the government dropped an investigation against a suspect and has taken no further steps to resolve the case.
“A sewing machine and a dozen colorful threads still give hope and strength to labor leader Aminul Islam’s family” but his widowed wife, Husne Ara, works around the clock to pay for food and school tuition for her children, writes the Bangladesh Daily Star.
Husne Ara said that Aminul could not speak over the phone because “he feared it was tapped.
“Even in the middle of the night, he received arbitrary phone calls from the intelligence,” she says.
Since Aminul’s murder, more than 1,200 garment workers were killed in the 2012 Tazreen factory fire and the 2013 collapse of Rana Plaza. After Rana Plaza, at least 44 workers have died in garment factory fire incidents in Bangladesh, and more than 900 people have been injured.
Myrtle Witbooi spent decades toiling as a domestic worker in South Africa and later built on her experience to become a national and global leader for domestic worker rights.
Now general secretary of the South African Domestic Service and Allied Workers Union (SADSAWU) and the first president of the International Domestic Workers Federation (IDWF), Witbooi says IDWF’s goals involve outreach to countries that do not have laws covering domestic workers and determining “how can we empower domestic workers to speak up for themselves, how can we empower domestic workers to form their own organizations and defy those who stand in their way.”
Witbooi made her comments in an interview on the Africa Today radio program in Sacramento, California, where she was participating in the United Domestic Workers of America/AFSCME convention. She and other domestic workers and advocates from around the world met with U.S. homecare workers last month as part of the Solidarity Center’s Multi-Regional Exchange for Domestic Worker and Migrant Worker Rights Activists and Leaders.
In connecting with U.S. homecare workers, Witbooi sought to put in play a fundamental union principle: strength through solidarity. “United, we can speak in one voice and in one language and that’s why we can win many more things for domestic workers,” she says.
In the interview, Witbooi offers an overview of the struggle by South Africa’s domestic workers to gain the same rights and protections as other workers. At one point, domestic workers chained themselves to the Parliament gates, one of a series of ongoing actions that resulted in the nation’s 2002 labor law covering domestic workers. Domestic workers went on to win unemployment compensation and a minimum wage.
Witbooi proudly says the global federation, formed in 2012, is “run by and controlled by women,” and notes its goals involve “forming organizations to empower women to be able to speak out for themselves.”
“To be able to say, ‘This is my right and I demand that you respect me as a woman and also my work is decent work and I want decent pay.’ ”
Listen to the full interview here (beginning at 19:54).
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