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(Bloomberg’s Opinion) – Workers around the world are at risk as governments and employers continue to violate globally identified labor rights.
According to the most recent Global Rights Index of the International Confederation of Trade Unions, which ranks countries for their respect for workers’ rights, “the breakdown of the social contract” is at its worst since the index was created in 2014.
Between April 2019 and March 2020, 123 countries violated the right to strike and 115 violated the right to collective bargaining; 106 countries excluded staff from joining or joining an industrial union; in 103 countries, staff did not have access to justice or limited; staff were arrested and detained in 61 countries; staff have experienced violence in 51 countries; and the staff was killed, adding at industry union demonstrations, in nine countries.
The damaging maximum blows were Bangladesh, Brazil, Colombia, Egypt, Honduras, India, Kazakhstan, the Philippines, Turkey and Zimbabwe. Workers and industry union leaders in these countries face regressive legislation, government surveillance, mass layoffs, anti-union measures and crackdown on strikes, as well as arbitrary arrests, prosecutions and imprisonments, death threats and murders.
This report written before the full scale of Covid-19 known. This is yet another explanation for why to expect his thought-about conclusions to shape the rights of staff and trade unions into any post-pandemic reconstruction, offering what Sharan Burrow, ITUC Secretary General, called “an opposite reference to that of asking governments and account entrepreneurs.”
This column necessarily reflects the perspectives of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
Ben Schott is an opinion columnist for Bloomberg. He has created schott’s Original Miscellany and Schott’s Almanac series, and has written for newspapers and magazines around the world.
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