Workplaces Must Adapt to Greater Role of Women In Workforce
A new Center for American Progress (CAP) report released in time for International Women’s Day today offers practical solutions to help America’s workers and families meet the dual demands of work and family. (Read the full report here.)
The report, “Our Working Nation: How Working Women Are Reshaping America’s Families and Economy and What It Means for Policymakers,” calls for:
- Updating basic labor standards to recognize that most workers also have family responsibilities and need predictable and flexible workplace schedules,access to paid family and medical leave the right to paid sick days.* Improving basic fairness in our workplace by ending discrimination against all workers, including pregnant women and caregivers.
- Providing direct support to working families with child care and elder care needs.
- Improving knowledge about family-responsive workplace policies by collecting national data on work-life policies offered by employers and analyzing the effectiveness of existing state and local policies.
World Day of Social Justice, Feb. 20
The global union movement will mark Feb. 20 as the World Day of Social Justice by calling for a new economic model that emphasizes jobs, not profits.
The current system of globalization has created the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. Social justice has been denied to millions of men and women hit by unemployment or marginalized into the ranks of the working poor, says Guy Ryder, general secretary of the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC).
If anything, the global crisis has served to show up the serious fault lines in the current model of huge capital accumulation through risky, unregulated financial transactions, and its failure to spread the wealth in a fair and sustainable way, through the creation of decent jobs and livelihoods for all.
Mexican Electrical Workers Fighting for All Workers
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Members of the Mexican Electrical Workers Union (SME) are vowing to fight as long as it takes to defeat the government’s heavy-handed, anti-union moves to break its independent union.
Speaking at a brown-bag luncheon last week at the AFL-CIO in Washington, D.C., Humberto Montes de Oca, SME’s interior secretary, and union Health Secretary Pipino Cuevas said workers are determined to fight the privatization. Montes said:
We are fighting for the rights of the 44,000 workers. We are using all means to resist the oppression of [the Mexican government].
Human Rights Day: Fighting for Domestic Workers
Today, International Human Rights Day, the National Domestic Worker Alliance is joining with domestic workers around the world to launch a campaign to call for improved labor standards for their industry.
Domestic work, which includes housecleaning, child-care and elder care, is not covered by many basic labor laws, leaving those who perform this work extremely vulnerable to abuse and exploitation on the job. Domestic workers across the globe are demanding the creation of international labor standards for domestic work through the passage of an International Labor Organization (ILO) Convention on Domestic Work. They also are proposing policy changes at the state and national levels to ensure basic labor protections for domestic workers.
Global Inequality, Workplace Deaths Increase—No Coincidence
Two new reports paint a sobering picture of what growing global inequality really means. Not only are wages continuing to drop, lowering the standard of living for millions of workers and increasing the wage gap, but evidence is emerging that rising inequality can be bad for your health.
First, the International Labor Organization (ILO), an arm of the United Nations, reported in its “Global Wage Report: 2009 Update” last week that global growth in real wages slowed dramatically last year and is expected to drop even further this year. The report found that in half of the 35 countries for which figures are available, real monthly wages fell in the first quarter of 2009 compared to their average of 2008, often due to cuts in hours worked.
Today Is World Day for Decent Work
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Today is World Day for Decent Work, and union members in more than 100 countries are mobilizing to address the global economic and employment crisis and demand fundamental reform of the world economy.
The deepest global recession since the 1930s has led to a jobs crisis with millions of people out of work. The International Labor Organization (ILO) predicts that as many as 50 million more workers could be kicked out of jobs worldwide in the next year and could lead to a dramatic increase in the number of working poor.
Live online coverage of the activities around the world, including videos, photographs and messages from events in every continent, will be broadcast on a special website, www.wddw.org, which will be updated via a 24-hour live feed.
Fight Child Labor in Uzbekistan
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As the harvest season for cotton in Uzbekistan begins, 2 million Uzbek children, some as young as six or seven and ranging up to 15, will be forced to spend their days picking cotton instead of attending classes.
Earlier this month, the U.S. Labor Department included cotton from Uzbekistan on a list of goods produced by forced and child labor. Each year during the three-month harvest, Uzbek authorities shut down hundreds of schools, hospitals and public offices. Along with the children, thousands of teachers, doctors and public administrators are forced into the fields.
The International Labor Rights Forum (ILRF) has joined with AFT and a broad range of organizations in the United States and Central Asia to call for an end to forced child labor in Uzbekistan. You can act today to stop this shameful practice by signing a petition here.
All supporters who sign the petition by Oct. 2 will have their names put on a special cotton quilt that will be unveiled at a rally in front of the Uzbek embassy in Washington, D.C., on Oct. 14. To get more involved in this action, e-mail volunteer@ilrf.org.
Global Unions: G-20 Made Progress, But Not Enough
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The G-20 Summit, which ended recently in Pittsburgh, made progress in some areas, but failed to completely address the overwhelming need to create new jobs now, according to leaders of the global union movement.
Trade unionists around the world will continue to pressure their governments to stimulate the global economy to put people back to work. Guy Ryder, general secretary of the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC), said that while he is glad the G-20 agreed to put jobs at the heart of their economic recovery agenda, big questions remain in some key areas.
With the global jobs crisis still worsening, a meeting of G-20 labor ministers to take place in early 2010 will be a key focus for the global trade union movement in the coming months.
The G-20 labor ministers’ meeting must push the maintenance and creation of decent jobs even higher up the agenda, with implementation of the ILO [International labor Organization] Jobs Pact as a central objective. The international trade union movement must be given a seat at the table in this meeting, and we will be carrying forward our intensive efforts with governments, the ILO and other global institutions to make sure it and the June G-20 Summit in Canada deliver the results that working people demand.
New Reports Detail Global Child Labor Products and Abuses
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Child labor, says U.S. Labor Secretary Hilda Solis, continues to be a serious global “problem in 21st century society” and says the United States “must do everything in our power to end these shameful practices.”
Solis’ comments came with the release earlier this month of three new reports by the Labor Department’s Bureau of International Labor Affairs (ILAB). The central report is a list of goods believed to have been produced by child or forced labor and it includes 122 products from 58 nations.
The report includes many products companies around the globe use as raw materials for finished products that are purchased by U.S. consumers. They include cotton, sugar cane, tobacco, coffee, rice, cocoa, bricks, garments, carpets, footwear, gold and coal.
Brian Campbell, International Labor Rights Forum director of policy and legal programs, calls the new list:
a critical tool that consumers and businesses can use to identify the sectors where forced and child labor abuses continue…this list helps to focus attention on problematic sectors and the challenge now is to implement business practices that lead to higher labor standards and living and working conditions for workers.
Click here for the report, “2008 List of Goods Produced by Child Labor or Forced Labor.”
Paramilitary Members Face Justice in Murders of Two Colombian Union Leaders
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Eight long years after Colombian trade union leaders Valmore Locarno Rodriguez and Victor Hugo Orcasita Amaya were assassinated, those directly responsible for these heinous crimes are being punished.
Just yesterday, Alcides Maneul Mattos Tavares, alias “el Samario,” confessed to having participated as one of the gunmen. The other assassin, Jairo Charris Jesus, was sentenced Aug. 7 to 30 years in prison for his role in the murders. Both men were members of the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (AUC), the umbrella paramilitary organization.
Two other paramilitary leaders, Rodrigo Tovar Pupo, alias “Jorge 40,” and Oscar Jose Ospina Pacheco, alias “Tolemaida,” also face trial for their involvement in these crimes. Tovar’s case is complicated, however, by the fact that he was extradited to the United States on drug-trafficking charges earlier this year.
Locarno and Orcasita, president and vice president, respectively, of Sintramienergica, the mine and energy workers union, were killed in March 2001. Both worked for the U.S.-based mining multinational, Drummond.
