News/Reports
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Remembering John Sweeney
It is with great sadness that we learned of the passing of our friend John Sweeney, the lion of the labor movement and a founding Board Member of the Global Fairness Initiative. His lifetime of service and advocacy on behalf of workers is an inspiration and guiding star for our work at GFI and his loss is felt deeply by us and working people everywhere.
The son of union members, Sweeney made the labor movement and the fight for worker rights his life’s work. Beginning with the International Ladies Garment Workers Union in Manhattan and then the Service Employees International Union, Sweeny championed the cause of the most marginalized of low wage workers in New York. In 1980 Sweeney brought the fight for workers’ rights to Washington serving as President of SEIU and then as head of the AFL-CIO, the federation at the heart of the labor movement representing over 12 million workers from teachers to actors to transport workers. It was during his tenure as President of the AFL-CIO that he joined the Global Fairness Initiative as a Founding Board Member.
In receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2011 Sweeney said that he saw the labor movement was “a way to social justice, striving to improve the lot of others.” This vision and his lifelong fight for equity, dignity and security in work inspired the founding of the Global Fairness Initiative and guides our work and mission to this day. Our values are rooted in his values and we are forever grateful for his for his leadership on our Board, and for his warm and wonderful friendship over these many year. In solidarity with workers everywhere, and on behalf of our whole GFI family, thank you John.
The Pandemic and Informality: What Needs to Be Done Now!
By Karen Tramontano
With over 35 million unemployed, over 138,000 dead from COVID-19 and over 3.5 million confirmed infections in the United States, it is difficult to think about anything other than the leadership and policy change that needs to happen in America. As bad as it is here — and it is getting worse — every aspect of what is bad in the U.S. is even worse for workers in the Global South — especially workers in the informal economy.
Tunisian Government passes “Auto-Entrepreneur” Law to Facilitate Formalization Efforts
The newly passed bill will ease the formalization process and improve the livelihoods of Tunisia’s informal workers.
WASHINGTON, DC - The Global Fairness Initiative (GFI) commends the Tunisian Government on the passage of the “Auto-Entrepreneur” law. Developed through years of direct engagement and partnership with informal workers, civil society, government and the private sector, this new law will serve to ease and incentivize the formalization of single-employee enterprises by reducing the barriers workers currently face when trying to formalize their activities. The passage and enactment of this law will directly benefit a large population of Tunisian workers, facilitating their integration into the formal economy and access to essential social and health services, labor protections, and other benefits and opportunities. As Tunisia’s informal workers have been disproportionately affected by the COVID-19 crisis, this new legal framework will allow for the extension of essential protections to populations most in need.
“We applaud the Tunisian Government for taking this important step towards the empowerment of informal workers.” said Karen Tramontano, President, Global Fairness Initiative. “As close partners with Tunisia’s Ministry of Employment in their efforts to facilitate formalization, we are proud of the leadership role that Tunisia has taken to enable the formalization process for hundreds of thousands of informal workers.”
As outlined by Tunisia’s Minsitry of Employment, the new law will:
-Reform Tunisia’s tax code to reduce barriers to formalization through consolidation of occupational sectors
-Create a government institution to streamline the formalization process by offering a central hub for the entire formalization process.
“This remarkable achievement was made possible through a fruitful partnership between the Tunisia Inclusive Labor Initiative and Tunisia’s Ministry of Employment and Vocational Training.” said Asma Ben Hassen, Tunisia Country Director, Global Fairness Initiative. “Informal workers are the backbone of Tunisia’s economy, and we have seen this even more clearly through the COVID-19 crisis. The Auto-Entrepreneur Law will allow so many of these essential workers to claim their rights and integrate into the formal economy.”
About TILI-EO
The Tunisia Inclusive Labor Initiative - Expanding Opportunities (TILI-EO) aims to create a more inclusive economy for informal Tunisian workers so they can access decent work and government-mandated protections. It is an expansion of GFI’s work within the informal sector and government actors in Tunisia, which began shortly after the revolution. The program aims to support the Tunisian Government in implementing its strategic objective on formalization, which includes creating new policies to support formalization, improving capacity and skills to support informal workers, and increasing public knowledge and engagement on formalization.
About GFI
The Global Fairness Initiative (GFI) aims to change the global poverty cycle through market-based initiatives that benefit small-holder producers and workers around the globe. Through community-based programs in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, GFI leads strategic partnerships and interventions that enable more equitable opportunity and drive full-employment for the working poor. GFI’s critical programs emphasize social protections and economic access, and ensure that the voices of the poor are integrated into public policy and echoed by decision makers in order to create a more equitable social and economic environment for small and marginalized producers. Focusing on the bottom line, namely strengthening wages, market access, decent work, and livelihoods as a whole, GFI has helped to improve the lives of thousands of workers and communities worldwide. To lean for about GFI visit: www.globalfairness.org
International Literacy Day: Learning from the Bricks of Change
By Homraj Acharya
International Literacy Day is celebrated each year on September 8. This year’s theme is Literacy and Skill Development, intended to recognize that the skills required for work have been evolving rapidly and that literacy is closely linked with technical and vocational skills. Literacy is becoming a precondition for survival in the current and future employment space for all people.
To see how literacy is a survival tool and how it is linked to skill development, simply go speak with the brick workers of Nepal. The Global Fairness Initiative and Better Brick Nepal have analyzed data on over 7,000 brick workers and found that 46 percent of workers are illiterate. That means that 46 percent of workers in the 1,295 brick industries strewn around the country do not know how many bricks they make, don’t know how much they have earned or what has been written in their contracts. Their rights might be written in the legal documents and NGO’s training leaflets and manuals, but they have to rely on others to tell them about it.
Many of these are among the 102 million illiterate people in the world between the ages of 15 and 24. These are not elderly people, born and raised before schooling was available in Nepal. A kiln is a place of hard manual labor, full of young, strong women and men, many of whom come with their children, who then live on the premises and work making bricks, continuing the cycle of illiteracy that robbed their parents of choices in life.
These people are highly vulnerable to exploitation and are more likely to be in the situation of debt bondage. Kiln workers often end up as forced and bonded laborers because they take loans from labor agents that they cannot repay, without understanding the loan conditions. They then fall deeper and deeper into debt, victims of exploitation to which they are vulnerable in part because of their illiteracy.
Literacy and education challenges are compounded for people who have to move seasonally with their family to look for work. So many things get lost in the annual transition and access to education is one of them. One effective way that we have found to combat the cycle of illiteracy, poverty and victimization at kilns has been through a program designed to meet the needs of migrant children, the Bridge Schools Program.
The Bridge Schools model uses four step process: 1) enroll children either in kiln constructed Early Childcare and Education Centers (ECEC) or the government ECD centers; 2) create linkages to nearby schools to ensure that migratory children of kiln workers can access education; 3) develop skill learning centers (SLC) activities for older children that are not interested in going to schools and sitting in formalized education settings but can be reached through vocational programs; and 4) provide before and after school program for children who are enrolled in school but need extra help to catchup with their peers to succeed in schools.
While the Bridge Schools Program prevents child labor and ensures that the next generation is not deprived of their education, adult workers are also trained on basic literacy skills including reading and writing their names, rudimentary counting so they can track their production totals and wages, and other essentials skills such understanding their rights and how to resolve conflicts within the kiln environment.
Teachers are also trained to address the needs of migrant children and the school itself becomes more sensitive to people who come from vulnerable backgrounds that may share similarities to the kiln children.
The Bridge Schools model can be used by any industry or sector where many workers are migratory in nature. Nepal is scheduled to graduate out of Least Developed Country (LDC) designation in December of 2021. However, if 46% of 200,000 kiln workers are still illiterate, and if the overall percent of illiterate population remains at the present 43%, the graduation will be only ceremonial, as the vulnerability of these people will have remained at the level of LDCs.
On the occasion of International Literacy Day, I urge government, private sector, civil society, political leaders, and development partners to not forget about the people working in invisible and informal sectors and to create collaborative platform to incorporate inclusive literacy strategies that have worked in their development programs.
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Homraj Acharya is an International Development professional. He is Senior Advisor for South Asia at the Global Fairness Initiative (GFI)—an International development organization headquartered in Washington, DC that promotes locally rooted solutions for the global economy and champions decent work around the world.
