Visits: 36
BRUSSELS – Major textile and garment producing countries including Bangladesh, Turkey, Guatemala and Myanmar have been named among the worst in the world for workers’ rights, according to a new report.
The International Trade Union Confederation’s (ITUC), Global Rights Index 2023 shows that key measures of violations of workers’ rights have reached record highs with demands to have labour rights upheld ignored and dissent met with increasingly brutal responses from state forces.
Bangladesh, Myanmar, Guatemala and Turkey have all been named in the top 10 worst countries for working people in 2023 with the report highlighting a raft of rights abuses such as restrictions on trade union activity, the suppression of free speech and violations on the right to strike.
In Bangladesh, for example, the report highlights how workers’ rights continue to be severely curtailed. Set up to attract foreign investment, the country’s eight export processing zones prohibit workers from forming a trade union or freely expressing their rights. In the garment sector, which is the country’s largest industry and employs more than 4.5 million workers, attempts at forming unions have been obstructed, while strikes have been met with brutality by the country’s industrial police force.
The report also highlights how in Turkey, a major textile and garment manufacturing hub supplying many of Europe’s leading brands and retailers, workers’ freedoms and rights have been attacked with police cracking down on protests and arbitrarily arresting trade union leaders. In addition, employers have continued to engage in systematic union busting by methodically dismissing workers who have tried to organise. Deputy general secretary of the Confederation of Progressive Trade Unions of Turkey (DISK), Fahrettin Engin Erdoğan, is among those that have been arrested.
In Guatemala, meanwhile, a vital off-shore textile manufacturing base for numerous US brands, the report highlights a prevailing atmosphere of repression, physical violence and intimidation against both workers and trade unionists.
“The 2023 ITUC Global Rights Index provides shocking evidence that the foundations of democracy are under attack,” ITUC acting general secretary Luc Triangle said. “There is a clear link between workers’ rights being upheld and the strength of any democracy. The erosion of one amounts to the degradation of the other.”
He continued: “Across both high-income and low-income countries, as working people have faced a historic cost-of-living crisis and spiraling inflation driven by corporate greed, governments have cracked down on the right to collectively negotiate wage rises and take strike action.”
The remaining countries making up the top 10 include Belarus, Ecuador, Egypt, Eswatini, Tunisia and the Philippines.
