By Charlie Fanning, Courtesy of the AFL-CIO
Hundreds of millions of fans around the globe cheer on their national teams at major sporting events such as the Olympics and the World Cup. Beneath the fanfare, host countries require vast amounts of labor to pull off the massive infrastructure updates and stadium construction needed for such events. The sad truth is that those who stage these events often undercut laws protecting wages, organizing rights, and health and safety protections. It is often migrant workers who pay the price for these fast-paced projects with injury, wage theft, forced labor and even death.
The Building and Woodworkers International (BWI)—a global union federation for the construction, woodworking and forestry sectors—has fought for these workers in construction sites from Brazil to Russia to Qatar. For its commitment to improving working conditions for construction workers and protecting the human rights of migrant workers, the AFL-CIO honored BWI on Thursday night with its annual George Meany-Lane Kirkland Human Rights Award.
AFL-CIO Executive Vice President Tefere Gebre expressed solidarity with BWI’s work.
“This is not someone else’s problem. These same patterns of abuse exist right here in America...migrant workers are tied to their employers, and if they speak out about violations of their rights, they fear losing their jobs and being deported.”
BWI has implemented innovative strategies, such as the Red Card for FIFA campaign, to reveal the dangerous and exploitive working conditions that migrant workers endure, and to pressure governments, international sports governing bodies and the brands that profit from these events to change conditions on the ground. With its affiliates, BWI also establishes agreements between unions in origin and destination countries to implement know-your-rights training, ensure equal pay regardless of workers’ country of origin and support organizing efforts.
The human rights situation in some host countries is, indeed, dire. In Qatar migrant workers are not free to leave the country or change employers, work in unsafe conditions, and are restricted from trade union activity. In Russia, migrant workers suffered extreme labor rights abuses in the build up to the winter Sochi Olympics earlier year. The international community should insist that all host countries for all international sporting events should be held to the highest standards when it comes to promoting labor rights.
Last night, BWI was joined on stage by an international soccer star who is now campaigning for the rights of migrant workers all over the world. Abdes Ouaddou played in Morrocco's national team, the English Premier League, as well as teams in France, and later in his career also played for Qatar's national team. The team failed to pay him for six months and then they withheld his exit visa so he could not leave the country. That experience inspired him to step forward as an international spokesperson for the rights of migrants and against abusive labor practices especially around sports events.
Proving there is a better way, BWI, along with Brazilian unions and the International Labor Organization, helped launch the Pact for Decent Work in the lead-up to the 2014 World Cup. Signatories agreed to prevent the use of forced and child labor, to ensure respect for fundamental labor rights, and to create permanent employment. While eight Brazilian workers ultimately died in unsafe conditions, one construction union, known as SINTEPAV, led a well-paid, unionized workforce in the state of Bahia to safely and efficiently build a 55,000-person stadium for the World Cup.
The annual Meany-Kirkland award, created in 1980 and named for the first two presidents of the AFL-CIO, recognizes outstanding examples of the international struggle for human rights through trade unions.
The award went to the International Domestic Workers' Network in 2013 and, in 2012, to the Tunisian General Union of Labor and the General Federation of Bahrain Trade Unions—two unions whose struggles were emblematic of labor’s role in the Arab Spring uprisings that year.