Labor Day 2010: Workers’ Rights Here and Around the Globe

by James Parks, Sep 2, 2010

Corporations that lead the way in creating fair working environments prosper—but too many employers and governments around the world are abusing workers’ rights, according to the findings of several reports released in time for Labor Day. You can check out all the reports on our Labor Day 2010 webpage here.

• “Labor Day List: Partnerships that Work,” by American Rights at Work, profiles eight companies that promote positive labor-management relationships in the clean energy industry. The companies and union employees featured in the report are leading the way toward a sustainable economy in which businesses thrive, the planet prospers and workers share in the success they help create.

• A  Human Rights Watch (HRW) report reveals that many European companies which publicly embrace workers’ rights and follow global labor standards at home sometimes undermine workers’ rights in their U.S. operations. The 130-page report, “A Strange Case: Violations of Workers’ Freedom of Association in the United States by European Multinational Corporations,” details how some European multinational firms have carried out aggressive campaigns to keep workers in the United States from organizing and bargaining, violating international standards and, often, U.S. labor laws.
• The HRW report has a long section on T-Mobile USA as one company that operates on this double standard. In the report “Lowering the Bar or Setting the Standard? Deutsche Telekom’s U.S. Labor Practices,” released in December 2009 by American Rights at Work, John Logan, a professor at San Francisco State University, found that T-Mobile is conducting a vicious anti-union campaign to prevent workers from joining the Communications Workers of America. This summer, T-Mobile USA workers visited Germany to tell shareholders at the company’s parent, Deutsche Telekom (DT), how the company denies its U.S. employees the freedom to join a union. Yet in many countries around the world, DT follows internationally recognized labor and human rights, including the freedom of association and the freedom to form a union. But not in the United States.
• A Freedom House report found that the rights of working people and trade unions are under serious duress throughout much of the world, and authoritarian regimes are using increasingly sophisticated methods of control.  ”The Global State of Workers’ Rights: Free Labor in a Hostile World” found that one-third of the global population lives in societies in which workers’ rights suffer a significant degree of repression.

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