Jun 3, 2025
When Enoch Gyaesayor logs into a digital app each day to begin picking up passengers and drive around Accra, Ghana, he hopes to get a few hour-long trips where he can be paid the daily top amount from Mondays to Fridays. After paying the company’s commission and job-related expenses, he says he makes 150 cedis ($14.64).
Enoch Gyaesayor, an app-based driver in Ghana, connected platform workers together in a union to build strength to improve working conditions.
But most of the time, Gyaesayor and thousands of other digital app drivers and riders are paid even less, and often work up to 16 hours a day, even sleeping in their vehicles to save petrol money going home and to be ready to start working again as quickly as possible. Higher pay on weekends does not reduce the amount of time they must work.
“There is no ‘off’ day for the driver,” Gyaesayor says, noting that he works seven days a week to support himself and his family.
In Ghana and in countries around the world, the Solidarity Center is building strength with platform workers to create a broad-based, global movement in which app-based workers join together to assert their rights, protect their lives and improve working conditions. Unions and worker organizations are making democracy real in workplaces, legislatures and global forums.
Digital Platform Work: A Growing Industry that Undercuts Labor Rights
A rapidly exploding industry, digital platform work now employs between 154 million and 435 million workers in online jobs. While often seen as a flexible job arrangement, digital app-based work is a growing business model that systematically undercuts labor rights and protections and shifts the responsibility of costs to workers.
With support by the Solidarity Center and the CGTP, digital platform drivers formed a union to collectively push for decent work and are now at the ILO in Geneva urging passage of a treaty improving work for platform workers worldwide.
Around the world, consumers depend on digital platform workers—requesting rides from Uber or Bolt, ordering meals from Zomato, receiving groceries delivered from Glovo, or viewing content on a social media platform. The online platform acts as an intermediary between the worker and the employer. For most workers, these jobs are not a “side gig”–they are full-time work.
Yet app-based workers in Ghana and in most countries worldwide are defined as “independent contractors,” and so not covered by national labor laws, such as a country’s minimum wage.
Some 3 billion consumers used online food delivery service—groceries and meals—in 2024. Although global food delivery alone was an estimated $380.43 billion in 2024, the workers transporting the food, driving passengers and moderating online content receive little pay and no safe and healthy working conditions.
Joining Together to Improve Job Conditions
Gyaesayor and other platform workers in Ghana say their top concern is to decrease the percentage of the commission app-based companies require drivers to pay. Uber takes 35 percent from workers’ pay; Bolt, 27.5 percent and Yango up to 25 percent.
The commission fee is only a portion of what workers must pay. With available cars scarce in Ghana, some companies “rent” cars to drivers, adding to a worker’s expense, which also includes mobile phone data, petrol and repairs.
Delivery drivers say they suffer from exhausting workdays, low pay and poor health conditions. Credit: Paloma Luna
Algorithms, which often incorrectly determine distance, time and types of trips offered, further decrease pay. Workers operate at the will of the algorithm and have little recourse to find out why they are locked out of jobs or why kilometers are incorrectly calculated.
“There is a lot of uncertainty and lack of consistency when it comes to rides, how much you will get paid, and so on,” he says.
Gyaesayor, now general secretary of the Digital Transport Workers Union (DTWU), began joining together digital app workers by talking with platform drivers at car parks and shopping malls, urging them to come together to improve their conditions. Several associations representing couriers and other digital workers formed a small association in the Accra and Ashanti regions, By 2023, they created DTWU with a broader reach, joining the Ghana Trades Union Congress (GTUC).
Improve Working Conditions by Joining Together
The digital app union in Ghana, which includes car and bicycle drivers and couriers, is among dozens of platform worker unions around the world, with workers joining together to achieve key goals, including:
- Minimum wage standards.
- Safe working environments.
- Basic social protections such as annual leave, sick leave and retirement benefits.
- Labor law coverage in their countries grants them the same rights as all workers.
To gain these basic rights, workers are engaging in legal action to win unpaid wages, receive compensation for job-related injuries and establish safe working conditions. And, they are mobilizing to improve national and local laws.
Food delivery riders improved pay at FoodPanda in Cebu, Philippines, part of platform workers’ efforts to assert their rights, protect their lives and improve working conditions.
across the globe.
Earlier this year in Mexico, app-based workers campaigned for — and won! — legislative reform that recognizes them as workers and provides access to accident insurance, pensions, maternity leave and company profits. In the Philippines, food delivery riders are improving benefits around the islands. In Cebu, Foodpanda drivers will receive a base fare of 55 pesos (94 cents) and the company will recognize them as employees.
Now, the workers are joining together to take their demands internationally.
Platform Workers Take Global Action
This week, platform work will be formally addressed for the first time on a global stage. At an International Labor Organization (ILO) conference in Geneva, digital app workers and representatives from business and governments are shaping a new international treaty, Realizing Decent Worker in the Platform Economy.
At an ILO conference in Geneva, digital app workers and representatives from business and governments are shaping a new international treaty to ensure decent work for platform workers around the globe.
Digital app workers have been crafting content that delegates will consider, and joining meetings with the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) and taking part in a six-day regional workshop in Togo by the ITUC-Africa. Platform workers also are involved in legislative strategies, meeting with their government representatives in advance of the conference.
Charith Attanapola, an app driver in Sri Lanka, met with the country’s minister of labor to convey platform workers’ challenges and discuss ways the government can improve working conditions.
“One of the key takeaways from our discussion was the government’s openness to ensuring decent work across all labor sectors, including app-based transport workers and delivery personnel,” says Attanapola.
Attanapola is part of the Solidarity Center delegation, which includes workers from Brazil, Chile, Ghana, India, Kenya and Mexico. As these workers testify, negotiate and help shape international labor standards that reflect the reality of their work and their demands, they understand the urgency in ensuring how jobs are shaped will determine the future.
In Ghana, where youth unemployment improved from 16.3 percent in 2000 to 5.4 percent in 2024, Gyaesayor knows that gain can be sustained only if decent work is available.
“Platform work has given employment to the majority of the youth; yet those of us who are working are being used like slaves, we get paid barely any salary,” says Gyaesayor. “The government must listen to the union, or things will get much worse; a lot of youth are going to be unemployed.”
Apr 2, 2025
In Tela, Honduras, where the only major employment is palm production, Iván is one of thousands of Hondurans who depend on his job to subsist. But until Solidarity Center training strengthened the workers’ ability to form a union and gain the strength to negotiate with their employer for decent work, they endured long hours and little pay to care for themselves and their families.
“If we have better conditions here, we won’t need to leave the country,” Iván says, noting his goal is for all workers to have decent living conditions and contribute to the country’s economic development. “That’s why we organize, to have better benefits than those offered by the law.”
Without continued Department of Labor (DOL) funding, palm workers in Honduras will lose access to essential training for achieving decent working conditions, making it easier for them to stay in the country.
This week’s termination of program funding for the DOL’s Bureau of International Labor Affairs (ILAB) eliminates how the United States enforces labor standards in trade agreements, protects American workers from unfair competition and combats child labor, forced labor and exploitation around the world.
Over the years, the Solidarity Center has implemented more than a dozen ILAB-funded projects across Latin America, Africa, Asia and Eastern Europe, including in key U.S. trade partner countries like Mexico, Bangladesh, the Philippines and Honduras. Cutting these programs harms U.S. workers, weakens trade enforcement and abandons the global fight for decent work and human dignity.
The Solidarity Center received $78.3 million in DOL funding for projects over the years. They have helped hundreds of thousands of workers build a better life for themselves and their families. Here are some of the workers’ stories in those programs.
Ending Forced Labor in Uzbek Cotton Fields
Cotton—in t-shirts, jeans and many household items—is so common, most of us do not give it a second thought. But for decades, millions of people, sometimes including children, were forcibly mobilized by the Uzbekistan government to harvest cotton for state-owned enterprises. Uzbekistan is the world’s sixth largest producer of cotton, producing over 1 million tons annually and employing around 2 million workers.
The project, now cut with the termination of DOL funding, sought to build on a 15-year effort that successfully eradicated systemic, government-imposed forced labor in Uzbekistan’s cotton supply chain. Through a multi-year global advocacy campaign led by the Cotton Campaign, of which Solidarity Center was a founding member, the government implemented reforms that, in 2021, brought an end to state-mandated forced labor.
To ensure workers who pick cotton continue working in safe conditions, the Solidarity Center signed a groundbreaking cooperative agreement last year with the government of Uzbekistan and other implementing partners to improve working conditions and prevent forced labor.
Ensuring fair labor standards protects U.S. consumers from unknowingly purchasing cotton picked as the result of forced labor, U.S. workers from competing with cotton made cheaper by exploitation and benefits workers in Uzbekistan.
A core priority of the new program would have been ensuring that all cotton sector workers have a written employment contract with enforceable work conditions. Employment contracts ensuring workers receive decent wages in safe conditions are vital, yet absent in many agricultural supply chains. This project aimed to both ensure the reforms to end forced labor in Uzbekistan are durable and help establish Uzbekistan as an alternative sourcing option to forced-labor-produced cotton from other countries.
Better Wages Benefit Mexico, U.S.
Credit: Arturo Left
In Silao, Mexico, Maria Alejandra Morales Reynoso painted auto parts for years alongside other auto plant workers forced to work double shifts with few breaks, even for the bathroom. Through Solidarity Center training and support, Morales and thousands of workers in Mexico formed an independent union, voting out a corporate-supported union that did not operate in their interest.
The union victory “gave people hope, hope that it was possible to represent workers freely,” she says. “We proved it’s possible to get organized and to fight for our rights and to leave behind the fear that we’re going to lose our jobs.”
The ability to improve their employment sparked momentum among other workers, and bolstered the ability of women to take a role in their jobs, as did Morales, now general secretary of SINTTIA, the union workers voted to form.
A reduction in the wage gap between Mexico and the United States, through authentic and transparent collective bargaining, benefits workers in both countries—by improving the wages of Mexico’s workers and disincentivizing companies from relocating from the U.S.to Mexico to exploit artificially low wages.
Over its 25 years of work in Mexico, especially since the enactment of the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) and its mechanisms for labor rights enforcement, the Solidarity Center’s efforts have benefited more than 42,000 Mexican workers through USMCA resolutions upholding their rights to freedom of association and collective bargaining and obtained over $6 million in back pay and benefits.
In one case, workers at an auto plant in San Luis Potosí won a 30 percent wage increase through a USMCA ruling.
An informed, empowered, and effective agreement across North America is crucial to counter efforts to undermine the promise of shared prosperity for workers in North America. The termination of DOL funding will negatively impact workers in Mexico and the United States.
Decent Wages for 3 Million+ Mine Workers
Ruth Adriana Lopez Patiño, Los Mineros, Julia Quiñonez, CFO, and Mariela Sanchez Casas, Los Mineros, all founders of the “Mineras de Acero” (Women Miners of Steel) training program, participate in a tour of a gold mine during a training in February 2015 on gender equality and women’s leadership. Credit: Los Mineros
In Mexico, where Los Mineros represents more than three million mine workers, the Solidarity Center assisted the union in successfully utilizing the USMCA’s labor instrument (Rapid Response Labor Mechanism) in 2022 to achieve union representation and successfully negotiate a strong bargaining agreement with a 15 percent wage increase.
“Thanks to technical assistance provided by the Solidarity Center funded by DOL/ILAB, we were able to use the Rapid Response Mechanism—a tool that helped us achieve justice,” says Imelda Guadalupe Jiménez Méndez, Los Mineros, secretary of political affairs. “Today our contract is 60 percent more beneficial to the workers thanks to authentic collective bargaining.”
Although the Mexican Supreme Court ruled in favor of the mine workers in 2019, it was only through the assistance of the Solidarity Center engaging in the USMCA that Los Mineros successfully negotiated a groundbreaking salary increase and significantly improved working conditions.
Mine workers in Mexico benefited from key Solidarity Center support. Shutting down Solidarity Center funding for the programs jeopardizes life-changing gains in workers’ wages, benefits and conditions and increases pressure on U.S. workers who must compete with low wages in Mexico.
Safeguarding Job Safety and Health
“Pure drinking water, a first-aid box is mandatory at our workplace, as well as women should be paid like as male co-workers,” says one woman who works at a construction site in Bangladesh.
Basic needs—fresh water, medical supplies—and wages to support her family are now accessible through Solidarity Center training that enabled her union leaders to develop a list that included crucial workplace safety and health protections and successfully negotiate to achieve those goals. In a highly competitive sector, where employers can treat workers as dispensable, such lists are essential tools that workers at a grassroots level can use to raise key concerns.
However, DOL’s termination of grant funding means thousands of construction workers in Bangladesh will not have the impact of basic workplace safety and health protections and will have little ability to receive decent wages.
These are only a few examples of Solidarity Center has benefited workers and their communities through DOL funding. Its termination will silence these efforts and undermine U.S. commitments to American workers and workers worldwide.
Halting Workplace Danger
In the electronics industry in Malaysia, the seventh largest exporter of electrical and electronics products in the world, workers producing the semiconductors used to power a range of consumer products endure hazardous conditions and lack job safety and health protections. They often face hazardous conditions, such as exposure to toxic chemicals, which can cause detrimental health effects, including cancers, respiratory issues, and even reproductive harm, including fertility problems and hazards for pregnant women. Often, they are targets of forced labor.
A new Solidarity Center project, which began in 2024, sought to improve occupational safety and health standards and address workers’ access to social benefits such as social security, compensation for injuries, health care and other labor protections. Many of the workers travel from other countries such as Bangladesh, Nepal, Indonesia, Myanmar and the Philippines and face additional challenges in the workplace.
Solidarity Center training, funded by the DOL, sought to strengthen workers’ ability to take part in their workplace and their union and hold leadership positions to promote safe and healthy work environments by building strong and inclusive unions to effectively address OSH in the workplace. Solidarity Center sought to increase engagement by workers and worker organizations with government officials and employers to negotiate, address, resolve and prevent OSH abuses in the workplace through collective bargaining.
The programs also aim to level the playing field for workers in the United States by ensuring workers around the world are not exploited and abused in the frequent attempts by employers and governments to skirt the law in countries such as those in Asia. But the funding for the Solidarity Center program to address dangerous conditions for workers producing electronics in Malaysia, as with all DOL-funded programs in countries throughout the world, have been terminated.
Sep 2, 2022
A new Labor Center in Mexico will advise workers about their rights and how to mobilize and organize unions and collectively bargain. The Labor Center, at the Autonomous University of Querétaro in central Mexico, is supported by the Solidarity Center and the UCLA Labor Center.
“The aim is to strengthen and promote the full recognition of labor rights, freedom of association and organization, and the democratic participation of workers through research, linkage and accompaniment,” said Labor Center Director Dr. Javier Salinas García. Salinas spoke at a recent Solidarity Center event in Mexico to announce the opening.
The Labor Center comes three years after Mexico’s government announced a series of comprehensive labor reforms to establish a democratic unionization process, address corruption in the labor adjudication system and eradicate employer protection (“charro”) unions prevalent in the country.
The Labor Center is “a way to respond to the needs of the situation,” said Beatriz García, Solidarity Center Mexico deputy program director.
“I think we all agree that Mexico is going through a historic moment. The labor reform responds to the demands that have been the objectives of the struggle of many workers for years, for decades, and reflects some positive practices of the independent unions,” she said.
The event featured a panel of independent union members and leaders who discussed the future of the labor movement in Mexico in the wake of historic labor law reforms.
Panelists explored the role that democratic and independent trade unions in promoting labor reform implementation in Mexico three years after the 2019 Labor Reform and negotiations of the United States–Mexico–Canada Agreement (UMSCA/T-MEC).
Speakers shared how they are using the tools of labor reform to organize on their worksites.
“We are the delegates, and we call our colleagues to share information about the Union League,” said Sonia Cristina García Bernal. “We have helped colleagues who were told they were going to be fired without severance pay. We have been able to get them severance pay. We have been able to get them rehired.”
“After these three years, the tool that we use the most is fast response mechanisms,” said Imelda Guadalupe Jiménez Méndez. “This has been a very important tool.”
In addition to Beatriz García, speakers included: Imelda Guadalupe Jiménez Méndez, Secretary for Political Affairs, the Miners Union (Los Mineros); Julieta Mónica Morales, General Secretary, Mexican Workers’ Union League (Liga Obrera Mexicana); Rita Guadalupe Lozano Tristán, Mexican Workers’ Union League (Liga Obrera Mexicana); Alejandra Morales, General Secretary, Independent Union of National Workers in the Automotive Industry; and Sonia Cristina García Bernal, Special Delegate, Mexican Workers’ Union League (Liga Obrera Mexicana).
Feb 3, 2022
The new, independent union, Sindicato Independiente Nacional de Trabajadores y Trabajadoras de la Industria Automotriz (SINTTIA), won the right to represent more than 6,000 workers at a truck plant in Silao, Mexico, in a closely watched election. SINTTIA won the election by a wide margin, defeating the entrenched CTM labor group that had held the contract at the plant for 25 years, and two other groups with ties to CTM.
SINTTIA won with 4,192 votes out of 5,389 valid ballots, in an election with 90 percent turnout. The three CTM unions combined won just over a thousand votes.
The victory happened despite attempts to buy votes and intimidate workers, and threats of violence leveled against union leaders and activists. One of those threatened was SINTTIA General Secretary María Alejandra Morales Reynoso. She spoke about the victory at a press conference.
SINTTIA General Secretary Maria Alejandra Morales Reynoso / Credit: Solidarity Center
“Today is a day in history for Mexican workers,” says Morales Reynoso. ” And we have just begun.”
SINTTIA’s victory could signify the beginning of the end of CTM’s decades-long hold on power. The labor group derived its strength from secret contracts, intimidation of workers and close relationships with Mexico’s previous ruling party and employers, whom they appeased by keeping wages low.
The election is a significant test of the impact of trade reforms, which expand worker rights and establish union votes by secret ballot to validate labor contracts. Mexico’s government estimates that prior to reforms, about 80 percent of union contracts were signed without workers’ knowledge, and helped suppress wages and give employers more control over workers.
At this one truck plant this week, workers were able to overcome corruption and threats of violence to vote out the sham union. Thousands of workers now have a chance at collective bargaining, raising wages and improving working conditions, but much work remains to ensure free and fair elections at thousands of workplaces for millions of Mexican workers.
