Solidarity Center: Global Approach to Workers’ Rights

by Donna Jablonski, Dec 24, 2006

“I work at a garment factory in al-Dhulayl (Jordan). I just came off a 24-hour shift unloading trucks into the stock room storage area. I was so exhausted that I fell and slashed my face. My arms ache….I have not been allowed to eat. My supervisor told me that if I go to the union, I will be beaten, put in jail and deported. I know that these are not idle threats….But I can no longer keep silent.”

Those are the words of 20-year-old Mohammed, a Bangladeshi migrant worker in one of Jordan’s nine Qualified Industrial Zones—huge factory complexes where goods are manufactured for export to countries all over the world.
 
Voices like his aren’t often heard in countries that sacrifice workers’ rights and well-being to the global economy. But Mohammed was speaking out to union organizers who, with the support of the AFL-CIO Solidarity Center, took on the plight of migrant workers in Jordan’s two largest industrial zones. Despite threats and Jordanian law that denies migrants the right to form unions as a way out of their desperate conditions, 200 workers joined a textile union within two months.

The Solidarity Center is a nonprofit organization formed by the AFL-CIO to assist workers around the world who are struggling to build democratic and independent trade unions, to achieve equitable, sustainable and democratic development and to help workers everywhere realize their rights and improve their living and working standards.

The center’s work in 2006 spanned almost every continent and workers’ issues ranging from HIV/AIDS to textile quotas and mine safety. Its 2005-2006 annual report highlights recent projects demonstrating that in a global economy, workers need a global ally.
 
Some examples: 

• In less than three months, nearly 1,000 South African wireless telecom workers joined a union through a regional joint organizing project of the Solidarity Center, the Communications Workers of America, UNI-Telecom (the global union representing 2.5 million telecommunications workers worldwide) and national UNI-Telecom affiliates in South Africa, Nigeria and Kenya. A major nonunion company with operations in all three countries also guaranteed it will remain neutral in organizing campaigns.
• A Solidarity Center international exchange program brought Nigerian telecommunications workers to the United States and sent U.S. trade unionists to Nigeria to provide union leaders there with organizing training. The training became a hands-on exercise when the Nigerian unionists decided to help the workers at their nonunion hotel form a union. Each night, they put what they had learned that day to use. Within three days, 85 percent of the workers had signed on to join the hotel workers union.
• Subcontracted maintenance workers at El Salvador’s International Airport had poorer working condition than the airport’s unionized workers. In May, with the help of their union colleagues, they formed SITEVMAIES—the country’s first union of subcontracted transport workers. The Salvadoran labor minister’s refusal to recognize the new union drew pressure from the global union movement—including official complaints to the ILO and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. That prompted the government to recognize the union in July.
• China has the world’s worst mine safety record, with accidents claiming the lives of nearly 10,000 workers each year. In 2005-2006, the Solidarity Center hosted three conferences on coal mine health and safety in various parts of China.
• The Solidarity Center’s global attack on HIV/AIDS includes partnership in SafeTStop, a five-year program to bring prevention, care and treatment to long-haul truck drivers and communities along the East Africa transport corridor. In Kenya, Djibouti, Rwanda, Uganda, and eventually Tanzania, SafeTStop centers at truck stops link truckers to HIV counseling and testing, treatment of sexually transmitted infections, education and training and support for orphans and at-risk children.

Find out more about the Solidarity Center here.

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