Labor & Employment Law

Solidarity Center Supports, Extends Workers? Efforts to Build Unions

By James Parks

Through its work in more than 60 countries on five continents, the AFL-CIO Solidarity Center is supporting and extending workers’ efforts to gain a better life by helping them to build strong unions. In its 2009 Annual Report, the Solidarity Center highlights its wide range of programs to help workers form unions. 

The Solidarity Center is helping African journalists in Rwanda and Burundi create full-fledged democrat­ic unions and joining with national unions in those countries to fight HIV/AIDS.

• In Pakistan, where teachers unions are banned, the Solidarity Center, with support from AFT, brought together 45 teacher associations to form the Teacher Consortium of Pakistan (TCOP). The 150,000 members of TCOP fight for issues important to all teachers in the country.
• The Solidarity Center supports an association of women workers in the Dominican Republic, comprised of both Haitian migrants and Dominican nationals, and conducts advocacy to ensure they know their rights as workers.
• With the support of the Solidarity Center, the Confederation of Free Trade Unions of Ukraine launched a campaign for quality health care and education. Members collected more than 50,000 signatures on a petition calling for adequate funding for medical and school supplies and other needs.

You can download the Annual Report here.

At the same time, the Solidarity Center is helping strengthen unions globally by aiding them in addressing issues of gender equity, rule of law and migration and human traf­ficking.

The AFL-CIO awarded the AFL-CIO George Meany-Lane Kirk­land Human Rights Award to Yessika Hoyos, a Colombian human rights lawyer, who formed an organization to fight for justice in the deadliest country in the world for union members. The Solidarity Center builds support from the U.S. labor movement for Hoyos’ work. The center also seeks to empower workers and strengthen the labor movement in Colombia, where more than 500 union activists have been killed in Colom­bia over the past seven years, including Hoyos’ father.

Nancy Mills, the Solidarity Center’s interim executive director, says:

Through these and other initiatives in difficult and often dangerous conditions, the Solidarity Center and its partners strive every day to hasten the suc­cess of union heroes and their allies in other worker rights organizations throughout the developing world as they struggle to build independent and effective labor unions.

The long-term economic and political well-being of the world’s people depends on that success.

Full post as published by AFL-CIO NOW BLOG on January 25, 2010 (boomark / email).