Kenya Domestic Workers Push for Convention Ratification

Kenya Domestic Workers Push for Convention Ratification

Hundreds of domestic workers rallied in front of the Kenya Parliament in Nairobi today,  lobbying legislators to ratify International Labor Organization (ILO) Convention 189, Decent Work for Domestic Workers. The effort is part of a larger campaign to improve wages and working conditions for the country’s domestic workers by the Kenya Union of Domestic, Hotel, Educational Institutions, Hospitals and Allied Workers (KUDHEIHA) as well as to help build momentum for a global movement for domestic workers.

“It is amazing. It shows [the] power of the domestic workers in Kenya,” said Africa Regional Coordinator for the International Domestic Workers Federation (IDWF), Vicky Kanyoka.

Convention 189 established the first global standards for the more than 50 million domestic workers worldwide, addressing wages, working conditions, benefits, labor brokers and child labor. Although the convention went into force in 2013, it has been ratified by only 23 countries. Of these, only two African countries have ratified the convention: South Africa and Mauritius.

Domestic workers are some of the world’s most vulnerable workers, comprising a significant part of the global workforce in informal employment. In Kenya, domestic workers have suffered pay below minimum wage, long working hours, physical abuse, discrimination and lack of job security. More recently, domestic workers migrating to jobs in the Middle East from the Mombasa area, in an effort to escape poverty wages at home, have been preyed upon by unscrupulous labor brokers and employers.

KUDHEIHA—a Solidarity Center partner—has stepped up its political advocacy on behalf of domestic workers with the support of the Solidarity Center in recent years. Legislative changes favorable to domestic workers included an increase in their minimum wage in 2015 as well as an increase last year in the minimum wage from 10,955 to 12,825.72 Kenyan shillings ($108 to $126) per month.

KUDHEIHA’s current push for government ratification of Convention 189 is an effort to secure additional recognition, rights and standards for Kenyan domestic workers working inside and outside the country.

The Solidarity Center works with domestic workers and other organizations that represent them around the world, including in Bangladesh, Cambodia, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Indonesia, Jordan, Kenya, Liberia, Mexico, South Africa and Sri Lanka.

Palm Oil Workers Strike for Recognition as Employees

Palm Oil Workers Strike for Recognition as Employees

More than 1,000 palm oil workers on strike outside San Alberto, Colombia are seeking recognition as employees. As subcontracted workers, they have no rights under Colombia’s labor laws, including freedom of association and the right to negotiate working conditions.

The workers walked off the Indupalma plantation on Thursday, after 668 out of 682 palm oil workers cast their ballots for a strike in a vote observed by the regional director of the Colombia Ministry of Labor.

Unlike workers who are recognized as employees, subcontracted palm oil workers must purchase their own tools, as well as join and pay dues to phony “cooperatives”—structures that enable companies to evade legal responsibilities under the labor law.

Last year, the palm oil workers formed the General Union of Third-Party Agribusiness Workers (UGTTA), and despite the region’s history of threats and violence against workers who form unions, the union has grown from 248 to some 1,010 members. The union reports four members have received death threats in 2018.

The Solidarity Center accompanied labor leaders, including Andrey Piñeres (video, below) who was laid off from the palm oil plantation after he became active with the union, to a meeting yesterday in Bogota with Colombia’s vice minister of Labor Relations to update her on the situation.


“The union met and voted unanimously to go on strike because of the company’s “refusal to negotiate direct contracting for more than 1,200 workers,” he says, calling on unions and civil society organizations to support their struggle.

The union says it is encouraged that the San Alberto Mayor assured them that if they do not block roads, he will not call in the riot police force, which has a history of violent repression of worker protests.

Employer Unions, Illegal Subcontracting

Solidarity Center, Colombia, palm oil workers, strike, human rights

María Eugenia Aparicio Soto, Colombia’s vice minister for Labor Relations, meets with union leaders and Solidarity Center staff to discuss the palm oil worker strike. Credit: Colombia Labor Ministry

In 2016 the Colombian government fined the company more than $1 million for unlawful subcontracting and its use of 23 “cooperatives” to undermine workers’ rights. The company is appealing the ruling.

The AFL-CIO and five Colombian labor organizations raised the issue of abusive subcontracting in a May 2016 trade submission under the U.S.-Colombia Trade Promotion Agreement (CTPA). Even though the Colombian government has outlawed cooperatives for subcontracting of full-time workers who perform the same function as employees, the practice continues to occur within the palm oil industry and in other sectors.

In a 2017 U.S. Department of Labor review that assessed Colombia’s progress in addressing the worker rights violations highlighted in the 2016 U.S. trade submission, the agency expressed “significant concerns that the Ministry of Labor is not taking sufficient action to implement the new decrees or to otherwise enforce prohibitions on abusive subcontracting that may undermine the rights to freedom of association and collective bargaining.”

Earlier this month, the Labor Department’s second review urged the government to “take additional effective measures to combat abusive subcontracting and collective pacts, including improving application of existing laws and adopting and implementing new legal instruments where necessary.”

Abused as Domestic Worker in Saudi Arabia, Fauzia Muthoni Now Aids Women in Kenya

Abused as Domestic Worker in Saudi Arabia, Fauzia Muthoni Now Aids Women in Kenya

Struggling to support her family, Fauzia Muthoni left her home outside Nairobi, Kenya for Qatar, where a labor broker promised her work as a receptionist.

Instead, she was taken to Saudi Arabia where was forced into domestic work for multiple families and physically abused. Unable to contact her family, she worked for months before finally escaping.

Now back in Kenya, Muthoni works with the KUDHEIHA, a Kenya-based union for domestic workers, educating women on their rights when they seek to migrate for work abroad.

Frito Lay Workers Wage 9-Year Struggle for Union in Dominican Republic

Frito Lay Workers Wage 9-Year Struggle for Union in Dominican Republic

Ramon Alexander Mosquea Rosario, a union leader at Frito Lay/Pepsico worksites in the Dominican Republic, helped form the National Union of Workers of Dominican Frito Lay (SINTRALAYDO), despite nine years of employer harassment, firings and retaliation.

He encourages other workers to never give up their struggle.

Kenya Union: Ban on Labor Recruiting Agencies Should Stay

Kenya Union: Ban on Labor Recruiting Agencies Should Stay

The Central Organization of Trade Unions–Kenya (COTU-K) said the country’s recent decision to lift its ban on workers migrating to Qatar and Saudi Arabia for jobs is “ill advised,” and urges the government to keep the ban in place until the Ministry of Labor provides a report that shows working conditions have improved.

“The ban was put in place after Kenyans suffered and many died in the Middle East,” says COTU-K Secretary General Francis Atwoli. Lifting the ban, which takes place at the end of November, will allow “Kenyans to be enslaved, tortured and killed in Gulf countries,” he says.

In 2014, Kenya banned some 930 recruiting agencies after reports of abuses, including murder, of Kenyan workers in the Middle East. Many Kenyans migrate for jobs, most employed as domestic workers and construction workers, because they are unable to find jobs at home.

Recent Solidarity Center interviews with Kenyans who had returned from jobs as domestic workers in Saudi Arabia highlight the brutal treatment they receive by employers, who force them to work without breaks day and night and often beat them and sexually assault them. Many, like Mwahamisi Josiah Makori, return home unpaid after months of abuse.

Together with the Solidarity Center, the Kenya Union of Domestic, Hotel, Educational Institutions, Hospitals and Allied Workers (KUDHEIHA) is reaching out to communities in the Mombasa area with a series of forums on migrant workers’ rights. Unscrupulous labor brokers promise workers higher wages than what they will be paid, describe working conditions far less grueling than reality, and do not show workers their contracts until they are at the airport or bus station. Frequently, the contracts are written in Arabic or a language the workers cannot understand, and the contracts may even change after they arrive at their destinations.

“The majority of African countries have banned their citizens from working in these Gulf countries,” says Atwoli. “Kenya should follow suit.”

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