Tag: labor rights

Summer Reflections Series: Solidarity Center

By Lissette Almanza

Through the generous support of the Rapoport Center’s Project on Inequality and Human Rights, I was able to spend my summer 2018 interning at the Solidarity Center in Washington D.C. The Solidarity Center, a global labor rights NGO affiliated with the AFL-CIO, works to empower workers to raise their voice for dignity on the job, justice in their communities and greater equality in the global economy. With the fellowship supporting my work on labor and human rights issues, I developed the skills and confidence to continue to pursue a career in international human rights advocacy.

Much of my work at the Solidarity Center’s Equality and Inclusion Department involved conducting research on the relationship between gender, trade policy and women’s labor rights, particularly as it relates to the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA). My deep-dive into this research allowed me to draft an intersectional analysis on gender-related issues and labor rights violations in the world of work. The exploitation of women workers for economic gains, especially in the garment industry, prevent women and their families from achieving better livelihoods. However, the abuses women experience at work often remain invisible. With a better lens into these issues, my research will help advance the advocacy efforts of the Solidarity Center by demonstrating to union partners in Africa the need to fight for women’s worker rights and an egalitarian workplace.

As the summer unfolded, I found myself immersed in work surrounding gender-based violence (GBV) at work. GBV is violence that is directed against an individual or group of individuals based on their gender identity and can take multiple forms, including physical and sexual abuse, bullying and coercion among others. Following the International Labor Conference (ILC) that took place from May 28 – June 8, a proposed global standard on ending violence and harassment against women and men in the world of work became one step closer to reality, with a strong focus on GBV. Since the International Labor Organization (ILO) is considering for the first time a Convention with a Recommendation on this issue, I quickly realized that I was in the midst of a valuable and learning experience at the Solidarity Center.

As part of this global march towards an ILO Convention with a Recommendation, I had the opportunity to participate in the process of assessing ways that the Solidarity Center can support partners and allies to champion its adoption in June 2019. I used my policy analysis skills to create a comparison document that analyzed the text of the proposed global standard and tracked the amendments offered during the ILC by government, employer, and worker members. These tools are intended to help union partners strategize for the next round of negotiations and understand the position of each member group. I also worked closely with another intern to create an evaluation survey and interviewed field staff across the globe on the work that Solidarity Center and partners have done towards addressing GBV at work, as well as supporting the ILO Convention.

In addition to my work this summer, the Solidarity Center also facilitated weekly sessions to enhance our understanding of labor rights issues, as well as skill-based workshops. Interns met with staff or union affiliates to discuss topics on child labor, migration and human trafficking, workers’ rights in the global economy, and on collective bargaining. The conversations and discussions were enriching and allowed me to grasp a better sense of the importance of advocating for labor rights. The monitoring and evaluation session developed my understanding on what helps improve and achieve results for advocacy work.

Along with immersing myself in international labor rights during my time at the Solidarity Center, my voice as a labor rights advocate blossomed. Now, I feel connected to the worldwide labor movement and prepared to advance workers’ rights wherever I go. I am incredibly grateful for this opportunity and look forward to applying the skills and knowledge that I gained this summer as I jumpstart my career in the international human rights field.

Nike’s Girl Effect and the Privatization of Feminism

by Megan Tobias Neely

21 NOV 2015

This commentary is a response to Maria Hengeveld’s paper, “Girl Branded: Nike, the UN and the Construction of the Entrepreneurial Adolescent Girl Subject.”

In 2009, Nike launched the Girl Effect, a “brand-led movement” targeting the alleviation of poverty among girls worldwide. The initiative advocates for investing in adolescent girls to create future workers and stimulate economic growth. For those who associate the Nike brand with anti-sweatshop movement protests over labor standards the Girl Effect may seem counterintuitive. Indeed, Nike moved to eliminate child labor in its factories only fifteen years ago, and the poor working conditions at Nike factories remain a concern for activists today.

Activists here at UT-Austin have taken up this issue. Our chapter of United Students Against Sweatshops demands the university to rethink its $250 million dollar contract with Nike. Last April, former Nike worker and worker’s rights activist Noi Supalai spoke on campus. She described how in Thailand—where women constitute a majority of garment workers—workers face unrealistic expectations for production, round-the-clock schedules, months of back wages, and little time to care for their families. Supalai led a worker’s union to negotiate improved conditions; however, Nike never responded to their requests.

Nike’s track record on worker’s rights raises the question as to whether the Girl Effect is a “brand-led movement” or a movement to re-brand Nike. In the winning paper for the 2015 Audre Rapoport Prize, Maria Hengeveld astutely argues that the Girl Effect only serves to legitimize Nike’s reputation and image by obscuring its own role in creating poverty while it rebrands itself as a proponent of human rights and gender equality. Hengeveld calls attention to how the campaign suggests simplistic solutions to alleviate poverty in the Global South that fail to consider how companies like Nike contribute to creating a global economy that exacerbates poverty among women and girls. By blaming gender inequality on the girl’s communities and placing the burden of alleviating inequality on the girls themselves, Nike does not offer viable solutions to patriarchy, explains Hengeveld.

The problem with Nike’s approach to girls’ empowerment, according to Hengeveld, stems from its neoliberal ideology that places the market as the appropriate avenue for promoting liberty, opportunity, and equality. Although the Girl Effect may have positive outcomes for individual girls, Hengeveld demonstrates how campaigns like Nike’s do little to alleviate poverty among women, because the employment available to them is low-paid and insecure.

Scholars like Radhika Balakrishnan and Jason Hickel, who spoke at the Rapoport Center’s recent Inequality & Human Rights conference, echo Hengeveld’s concerns. Balakrishnan has argued that women’s empowerment in the workforce cannot be achieved without improving conditions for laborers generally. Hickel (2014) too has examined the contradictions of the Girl Effect in which “women and girls are made to bear the responsibility for boot-strapping themselves out of poverty that is caused in part by the very institutions that purport to save them” (p. 1355).

Indeed, Hengeveld explains how Nike’s corporate agenda contributes to a neoliberal system that exacerbates poverty and inequality worldwide, with disastrous consequences for both women and men. An in-depth investigation of these consequences is the next step in Hengeveld’s research: Earlier this year, she interviewed 25 women who work for Nike in Vietnam about the factory and living conditions they face.

The solution to improving these conditions, according to Hengeveld, does not lie in resolving inequality between men and women workers in the Global South but in changing a neoliberal system that rests upon the disenfranchisement of the poor. As Hengeveld contends, “in practice, equalizing the labor standards, market access and wages of women in Nike’s factories with their male counterparts will hardly be emancipatory or liberating if male workers are not protected by decent job protections, collective bargaining rights and living wages” (p. 12).

While I agree with Hengeveld, I fear that campaigns to improve labor standards overall will not necessarily empower women unless addressing gender inequality is a central goal. Garment work is devalued precisely because it has been deemed “women’s work,” which is crucial to understanding the shortcomings of Nike’s gender campaign. Moreover, as Joan Acker (2004) argues, “gender is embedded in the structuring and ongoing practices of globalizing capitalism” (p. 23). Thus, finding a solution requires an analysis of how gender structures the exploitation of these workers in the first place. In particular, an intersectional lens can shed light on how garment work is gendered, racialized, and nationalized.

For example, in 2013, the deplorable conditions of garment workers came to the world’s attention when a factory in Dhaka, Bangladesh collapsed, killing 1,138 workers and injuring 2,500 others. Yet mainstream media coverage of the disaster paid little attention to the fact that women comprise 80 percent of Bangladeshi garment workers, who face precarious working conditions and unsustainably low pay.

In fact, women compose a majority of garment workers throughout the Global South and are at the frontlines demanding change. Ethnographers Leslie Salzinger (2003) and Melissa Wright (2006) demonstrate how corporations portray these women’s labor as pliable, temporary, and surplus to devalue it in the pursuit of capitalist profit. Thus, gender, race, and poverty are deeply connected in global capitalism.

Yet, liberal feminists maintain that employment will liberate women by providing them with more bargaining power in their families and communities. Nike’s Girl Effect is part of a resurgence of neoliberal feminism (also called transnational business feminism), which contends that the best avenue for women’s empowerment is through the private sector. This movement has gone global through campaigns led by U.N. Women, the World Bank, and the IMF to promote economic opportunities for women.

Socialist and women of color feminists, however, have long contended that greater participation in paid employment does not liberate women, because capitalism has been contingent on the exploitation of women of color and low-income white women (see Hartman, Hooks, Davis, and Nakano Glenn). Transnational feminist scholars like Esther Chow and Aihwa Ong pioneered intersectional scholarship on global capitalism, identifying how it constructs hierarchies according to nationality, race, class, and gender that perpetuate inequality.

While paid labor may, to an extent, improve some women’s status in society, it may also subject them to precarious and risky working conditions inextricably tied to their position as women of color in the Global South. Moreover, it is the devaluation of women’s labor that makes the profits of corporations like Nike possible. How might recognizing this lead to more effective campaigns to empower women in this neoliberal era?

Megan Tobias Neely is a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology the University of Texas at Austin and a member of the WPS Editorial Committee. Her current research is on gender and work in the financial services industry.