Nov 1, 2021
A magistrate court in Nigeria this week recommended prosecution of a man accused of sexually assaulting a minor in a bustling Lagos open marketplace—and gender rights activists there say the move was the direct result of awareness training conducted with market vendors about their right to violence-free workplaces. Nasiru Umaru, 44, is now in KiriKiri correctional center. The girl was helping her mother make extra money by selling goods, as do many children forced to work in hazardous environments to ensure their families make enough to meet basic needs.
Bringing a case like this is rare in the market, says Onyeisi Chiemeke, an attorney with International Lawyers Assisting Workers network (ILAW), which is aiding with the prosecution. Chiemeke says a newly formed gender-based violence task force in the market brought attention to the alleged rape, and the case now goes to trial in Nigeria’s high court. ILAW, a project established in 2018 by the Solidarity Center, is the largest global network of workers’ rights lawyers and advocates.
Building Synergies to Fight Violence and Harassment
Amina Awal, Hausa language GBVH educator trainer, reaches out to workers in the Mile 12 Lagos market truck park. Credit: Solidarity Center / Nkechi Odinukwe
Following the 2019 adoption of Convention 190 at the International Labor Organization (ILO), union leaders at the Nigeria Labor Congress (NLC), together with the Solidarity Center, began training workers, seeking to put into practice C190’s extensive provisions on preventing and ending gender-based violence and harassment (GBVH) in the world of work.
“I think we are making a lot of progress, a lot of awareness,” says Rita Goyit, head of the NLC’s Department of Women and Youth and secretary of the NLC National Women Commission.
Mile 12 market vendors who took part in the training quickly formed a GBVH task force that worked with the NLC to develop a market code of conduct covering gender-based violence and harassment. The vendors also posted suggestion boxes for reporting GBVH, and the NLC’s Lagos State union chapter leader monitors the submissions and alerts the NLC when necessary.
Vendors also are creating posters to spread awareness and talking with other sellers at the vast, sprawling market, where thousands of people visit each day to buy vegetables, legumes and other food items.
NLC and market leaders at the Mile 12 market in Lagos partnered to raise awareness about gender-based violence and harassment at work. Courtesy: NLC
Key to the success of the trainings, says Goyit, is that they were held in local languages. “That was one of the strategies that really worked—it was a language they understood. People talked one-on-one in the local language.” Vendors from across Nigeria travel to Mile 12, the largest in Lagos, to sell their wares.
The NLC also is joining with unions and allied organizations in urging the government ratify C190. Ratifying an ILO convention signifies a country’s intention to be bound by its terms. Union activists worldwide are campaigning for its ratification, and nine countries have done so.
As the accused man awaits a court hearing, Chiemeke says the synergy between market vendors and lawyers is helping make concrete the rights that Convention 190 provides to violence-free environments.
Oct 28, 2021
Last week, 125 women improved their wages and working conditions through a new negotiated agreement with an Albanian subsidiary of an Italian multinational lighting company. The agreement, which ended a 15-day work stoppage, was supported by Solidarity Center Albania union partners Bashkimi i Sindikatave te Pavarura te Shqiperise (BSPSH) and Sindikata e Pavarur e Minatoreve te Shqiperise (SPMSH).
“An extraordinary example, these 125 women; an example to be followed by all!” said SPMSH-Albania President Gezim Kalaja, who partially credited the win to support from Confederazione Italiana Sindacati Lavoratori (CISL), European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC), International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC), IndustriALL Europe, IndustriALL Global Union, Pan European Regional Council (PERC), PERC’s Women’s Committee and the Solidarity Center.
The agreement won substantial wage increases—7 percent during year one, 11 percent during year two and 17 percent during year three—and sidelined an employer-proposed reduction in the number of shifts available for workers.
Iliria-Electric Albania produces plastic components for lighting sold on the European market by Arditi Italy.
The win underscores the company’s course correction toward respect for fundamental labor rights, including the right to collective agreements and freedom of association in Albania, said IndustriALL Europe General Secretary Luc Triangle.
Oct 22, 2021
Afro-Brazilian union leader and city councilman Alexsandro Faria was murdered on October 13, 2021. Known as Sandro do Sindicato–or Sandro from the Union–Faria was on his way to a worker assembly when he was shot dead while driving a van in Duque de Caxias, the section of Rio de Janeiro where he lived.
Faria was the third city councilor in Duque to be killed this year. In 2018, Marielle Franco, a progressive Afro-Brazilian and lesbian city councilor representing one of Rio’s poorest districts, was assassinated, leading to global denunciations.
Faria’s union issued the following statement concerning his murder:
SITICOMMM (Union of Workers in Civil Construction, Industrial Assembly, Furniture, Marble and Granite and Wicker), repudiates the cowardly murder of fellow union leader and city councilor Alexsandro Silva Faria, Sandro do Sindicato.
All SITICOMMM leaders are in solidarity with his family and friends and deeply regret the loss of their loved one.
We emphasize the daily struggle of our comrade Sandro in defense of workers, especially in our city of Duque de Caxias, while he was acting as Union Director.
We also highlight his brief role as elected councilor with the support of 3,247 voters. In a short time in office, he was already bringing changes to the entire city, especially to the Pilar neighborhood.
Comrade Sandro is the third city councilor murdered this year in our municipality. These and other crimes need to be elucidated by the police, as they are a serious attack on the rule of law and democracy. These barbaric crimes cannot go unpunished!
Black, humble, who fought tirelessly for the workers, Sandro do Sindicato.
We want an answer! #SandroVive #SandroVive #SandroVive
“This is a huge loss,” says Solidarity Center Brazil Country Program Director Gonzalo Martinez de Vedia. “Sandro was a worker who moved up to lead a union, an Afro-Brazilian whose connections to the grassroots brought him to public office. That his career ended this way and that he is the third not to finish his term in that same position due to murder sends a troubling message to others aspiring to that path who come from similar backgrounds.”
The union is following the investigation into Faria’s murder closely. The International Trade Union Confederation ranks Brazil among the 10 worst countries in the world for worker rights, noting two murders of union leaders in 2020 as one of the drivers of this ranking.
Faria was buried at the Nossa Senhora do Pilar Cemetery, in Duque de Caxias, Thursday, October 14, 2021.
Oct 22, 2021
Climate justice activists are increasingly under attack across the globe by governments acting in concert with private interests, a trend that threatens civic freedoms for all, says the United Nation’s special rapporteur on the rights to freedom of peaceful assembly and association in a new report.
UN Special Rapporteur on the rights to freedom of assembly and of association Clément N. Voule
UN Special Rapporteur Clément N. Voule delivered the report to the UN General Assembly last week and then discussed its findings at a virtual side event October 15. At the event, Voule outlined the escalating threats to climate activists and their organizations, including criminalization of peaceful protests—the foundation of grassroots human rights advocacy campaigns. Of special concern, he said, are the use of state agencies and legislatures by private interests to impede or eliminate environmental defenders through physical attacks, intimidation, imprisonment and other judicial harassment, as well as restrictions on funding and travel to international climate justice venues.
More than 70 percent of human rights defenders killed each year are standing up for the environment, he said.
The report found a pattern of escalating threats that are undermining the effectiveness of environmental activists and their organizations worldwide, such as:
- Violence and intimidation
- The use of national security laws to surveil, charge or imprison environmental activists
- An increasing number of bans and restrictions against formerly legal protest methods, such as road blocking
- Ramped-up public smear campaigns that destroy activists’ reputations by painting them as extremists, foreign agents or terrorists
The report cited “powerful actors, including transnational fossil fuel, extractive, agribusiness and financial institutions,” that are pressuring governments to weaken their climate response and which “have supported parastatal organizations engaging in a variety of campaigns against climate justice activists, including online and direct violence.”
However, said Voule at the side event, “We must change the narrative. Environmental activists are not the enemy.”
The side event was led by Voule in cooperation with Earthrights International, European Center for Not-for-Profit Law (ECNL), Geneva Academy, Greenpeace International, International Center for Not-For-Profit Law (ICNL), International Service for Human Rights (ISHR) and the Solidarity Center. The event was moderated by Greenpeace International Legal Counsel Daniel Simon. Presenters included Permanent Mission of Costa Rica to the UN in New York Ambassador Rodrigo Carazo; Permanent Mission of Ireland to the UN in Geneva Ambassador Michael Gaffey; Earthrights International Climate Change Policy Adviser Natalia Gomez; First Nation Couchiching and U.S.-based Giniw Collective Founder Tara Houska; economist and Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) Labor Market Policy Coordinator Lebogang Mulaisi and Secretary General’s Envoy on Youth Jayathma Wickramanayake.
COSATU Labor Market Policy Coordinator Lebogang Mulaisi
COSATU is joining the climate justice fight, said panelist Lebogang Mulaisi, because working people—especially those in the informal sector unfairly unprotected by labor laws and excluded from social safety nets—are the group most impacted by climate change. Unions are natural allies of defenders of community environmental rights because workers are from communities, she said.
“Climate justice is for everyone, and climate justice is now,” she said.
Unions will ally with the environmental justice movement to defend everyone’s rights, Mulaisi added, because they can only fight effectively for decent jobs while retaining the right to legally mobilize “mass social power” when negotiations at the conference table fail.
All states must ensure that all workers are guaranteed the right to associate, including the right to strike, and to bargain collectively at all levels, including over matters related to climate change and just transitions, recommends the report.
Unions Are Integral to the Climate Justice Movement
The report finds that unions are integral to states’ efforts to meet the objectives of the legally-binding Paris Agreement, which calls for states to “respect, promote and consider their respective obligations on human rights” and rights of indigenous peoples, as well as to take into account “the imperatives of a just transition of the workforce and the creation of decent work and quality jobs in accordance with nationally defined development priorities.”
Unions are helping states achieve these objectives by:
- Advocating for a just-transition agenda, which is a worker-led framework demanding a fair and democratic approach from governments that are shifting their economies to sustainable production—including application of a range of social interventions that are needed to secure worker rights and livelihoods
- Advancing a climate justice agenda and influencing employers at workplace, sectoral, national and international levels to transition to clean energy and address environmental degradation.
The effectiveness of workers and unions to drive inclusive climate solutions is being hampered by issues that must be addressed and resolved, including:
- Regular exclusion of unions and workers from critical climate discussions and policy design and planning, such as those associated with nationally determined contributions (NDCs) and job-loss mitigation projects developed under the Paris Agreement
- Through the exclusion of large swaths of workers from labor laws, barriers to those workers’ right to exercise freedom of association and peaceful assembly—with migrant workers and those employed in agricultural or informal sectors, or by foreign investors, being especially vulnerable.
Governments and employers must engage with workers and their organizations to develop climate and just transition policies, says the report because “[a]ddressing the climate crisis and ensuring a just transition require the existence of a vibrant and dynamic civil society.”
Oct 13, 2021
Around the world, young people with few job options are forced to take whatever work they can find, no matter how low the pay or insecure the work. Many sign on with platform-based jobs to get by. Others leave their country with the hope of finding decent, secure work elsewhere, looking for a chance to fairly compete on a level playing field.
The latest Solidarity Center Podcast takes a look at what’s happening in Serbia, where one in four young people are not employed and not in school, and how unions there are meeting the challenges.
“The number one issue for all countries in the region and all young people is decent employment and the potential to find a job for each person in a way that is transparent and efficient and without corruption,” says Bojana Bijelovic Bosanac, a political scientist and expert adviser in the International Department at Confederation of Autonomous Trade Unions of Serbia (CATUS).
Bosanac tells Solidarity Center Executive Director and podcast host Shawna Bader-Blau about a union-lead survey among young workers in the Balkan region during the pandemic in which many reported being unpaid for their platform work as programmers, customer service reps, telecenter workers and delivery drivers, with nowhere to turn for support. Making the union their home is a key goal for CATUS and unions across Serbia.
“When we talk to young people, we want them to know that they are part of the union. They are the future of the union. We are inviting them always to approach, to come, to participate and to be leaders of the union.”
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The Solidarity Center Podcast, “Billions of Us, One Just Future,” highlights conversations with workers (and other smart people) worldwide shaping the workplace for the better.
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This podcast was made possible by the Ford Foundation and the generous support of the American people through the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) under Cooperative Agreement No.AID-OAA-L-16-00001 and the opinions expressed herein are those of the participant(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of USAID/USG.
