The ITUC Global Rights Index 2021 shows just how far some governments and employers have gone to exploit the Covid-19 pandemic to attack the rights of working people. It is our job to use the 2021 Rights Index to expose these violations to build pressure to deliver with workers a New Social Contract with jobs, rights, social protection, equality and inclusion.
This eighth edition of the Rights Index ranks 149 countries by their respect for workers’ rights. For the first time, it has an interactive platform where cases of violated rights and national ratings can be viewed by country and region. As a comprehensive review of workers’ rights in law, it provides the only database of its kind.
It tells a shocking story.
While working people stood on the front line in the health crisis providing essential services to keep economies and communities functioning, the 2021 Rights Index documents a shameful roll call of governments and companies who pursued an anti-worker agenda. Workers were even targeted for exposing vital information about the virus and their conditions.
In South Africa, Volkswagen South Africa (VWSA) dismissed shop stewards for ‘inciting’ workers to stop work after they exposed high numbers of workers testing positive for Covid-19. Falabella, a multinational home retailer, dismissed 22 warehouse workers in Peru who had requested health and safety protections against the virus. In Cambodia, collective bargaining negotiations were halted by the Cambodian Airport Management Service due to the pandemic, allowing the company to impose work suspensions unilaterally in all three airports without consulting the union.
There has been a staggering increase in the number of countries where authorities impeded the registration of unions from 89 countries in 2020 to 109 countries in 2021, including state repression of independent union activity in Belarus, Egypt, El Salvador, Jordan, Hong Kong, Kyrgyzstan and Iraq. To deny workers the right to representation in the middle of a global pandemic is abhorrent.
The ten worst countries for workers in 2021 are Bangladesh, Brazil, Colombia, Egypt, Honduras, the Philippines, Turkey, Zimbabwe, plus Belarus and Myanmar for the first time.
Nine countries have seen their ratings worsen: Belgium, Canada, El Salvador, Haiti, Hungary, Jordan, Malaysia, Myanmar and Slovakia.
Five new countries have been rated for the first time in 2021: Armenia, Gabon, Guinea, Kyrgyzstan and Niger. Saudi Arabia has not been rated while the extent of its new Labour Reform Initiative is assessed and implemented.
A deteriorating rights environment – and some bright spots
The 2021 Global Rights Index exposes that several key measures of workers’ rights has worsened.
Eighty-seven per cent of countries have violated the right to strike. Strikes in Belarus, Indonesia and the Philippines to oppose authoritarian governments, and in Myanmar to oppose the military junta, have been met with brutal repression.
Seventy-nine per cent of countries have violated the right to collective bargaining. In all regions, collective bargaining is being eroded and is used by authoritarian governments in Belarus, Brazil, Honduras, Hungary and Hong Kong to dismantle a key tenet of workplace democracy.
Seventy-four per cent of countries excluded workers from the right to establish and join a trade union at all.
Workers faced violence in 45 countries and trade unionists were killed in six countries: Brazil, Colombia, Guatemala, Myanmar, Nigeria and the Philippines. The Americas is the deadliest region for workers, with 22 trade unionists murdered in Colombia alone.
The number of countries where freedom of speech and assembly was denied or constrained increased from 56 in 2020 to 64 in 2021, with extreme cases reported in Hong Kong and Myanmar.
Workers had no or restricted access to justice in 65 per cent of countries and workers experienced arbitrary arrests and detentions in 68 countries. Trade union leaders from Cambodia, Hong Kong and Myanmar were among high profile arrests in 2021.
A new worrying trend is a rise in surveillance of workers and attacks on the right to privacy. In the United States, Facebook and Google have been exposed using illegal or underhand surveillance activities. Amazon’s surveillance of workers in Europe and the US has become a global scandal.
There is some light in this darkness. There is proof that the erosion of workers’ rights is not inevitable, it is a choice. Six countries have seen their ratings improve, including Bolivia, Greece, Mexico, Panama, Sudan and Togo.
Positive legislative developments include the PRO Act in the USA and processes for due diligence legislation in the European Union to hold companies to account.
But it will take more than this to rebuild the trust crushed by repressive governments and abusive companies. It will take a New Social Contract with good jobs, rights, social protection, equality and inclusion.
Go to www.globalrightsindex.org now. Use the report as a campaigning tool to show the work that needs to be done to build an economy that works for everyone, and to show the cost to everyone when workers rights are ignored or attacked.
Workers have held communities together during the global pandemic. When they are attacked, when they are refused rights and protections, they cannot look after the economy and governments cannot ignore the risk and damage done to our democracies and economies.
