Despite the progress made on several human rights fronts over the past couple decades, workers’ rights are under threat and have eroded in many places, both in the U.S. and around the world. For many millions of workers, those rights don’t exist at all.
A new partnership between philanthropy, governments and labor organizations is looking to make a difference. Last month, a group of philanthropic institutions — the Ford Foundation, Fundación Avina, Humanity United and the Open Society Foundations — joined the Biden administration’s Multilateral Partnership for Organizing, Worker Empowerment and Rights (M-POWER) initiative, a cross-sector partnership to support workers’ rights as a central tenet of democracy.
These philanthropic funders are all part of a collaborative of donors called FORGE (Funders Organized for Rights in the Global Economy), which seeks to create a global economy that works for everyone. This work also builds on Ford’s ongoing commitment to support workers around the world, including through its Future of Work(ers) program.
For the M-POWER initiative, the Biden administration has committed $130 million in funding from across several agencies, including the Department of Labor and the Department of State. The labor department characterizes it as the largest commitment the U.S. government has made to “advance workplace democracy and support trade union rights in the global economy.”
“We are bringing together leaders from labor, governments, civil society and philanthropy. We’re responding to urgent cases where labor activists and organizations are facing threats… and will coordinate our funding and diplomacy to lift workers’ voices and promote workers organizing all across the country and across the world,” said U.S. Secretary of Labor Marty Walsh during a recent event to publicly launch M-POWER.
Walsh added, “Labor rights are fundamental to democracy, and I think that’s really important, even here in the United States of America. The collective voice of working people is fundamental also to democracy, and strong and independent labor movements are fundamental to democracy.”
Besides Ford, the other U.S.-based philanthropies involved in M-POWER have also backed workers’ rights in the past — and are among a short list of major U.S. funders that do so. Humanity United is a part of the Omidyar Group of social impact organizations, and its participation reflects Pierre and Pam Omidyar’s philanthropic interest in workers’ rights, which has also manifested in the Omidyar Network’s U.S.-focused worker power funding. Then there’s OSF, a powerhouse progressive grantmaker that has also sought to step up its support for global workers’ rights recently. OSF helped convene the philanthropic funders that would go on to form FORGE.
Other participating governments are those of Argentina, Canada, Germany, South Africa and Spain. The trade union and labor organizations that will guide and shape the initiative include the International Trade Union Confederation, the International Domestic Worker Federation, the AFL-CIO and the Solidarity Center.
Among the initiative’s goals are to strengthen free and independent trade unions, support labor law reform and enforcement, promote worker organizations and the use of collective bargaining, and to extend labor laws to protect workers in vulnerable sectors — such as the informal economy — who are often excluded from labor law protections.
“We’re facing a diversity of challenges that are stopping workers from being able to exercise that voice that we all say they need, so we need a diversity of approaches and a diversity of tools,” said Sarita Gupta, vice president of U.S. programs at the Ford Foundation, during the public launch.
Workers’ rights and democracy
For M-POWER, workers’ rights are not an isolated issue. Rather, they intersect with other kinds of human rights, such as racial and gender rights.
“For billions of working people around the world, the rights of freedom of association and collective bargaining are eroding, are under threat, or are absent,” Gupta said. “These rights are especially key to eradicating gender-based violence and harassment in workplaces worldwide.”
Workers’ rights are also directly related to healthy and functioning democracies. “For many people around the world, our first real experience with what democracy means is at work,” said Shauna Bader-Blau, executive director of the Solidarity Center. “We make change happen in real life right there at work through our collective action, forming a union, getting bargaining, changing real wages and working conditions and having a real voice.”
Bader-Blau added that democracy is incomplete if workers don’t have a say over their wages and working conditions. The voice of workers is the voice of democracy, she said.
“Normal people are shut out from democracy and the practice of democracy through marginalizations, through concentrations of wealth, through authoritarianism, and other forms of power that disenfranchise the majority. But collective worker action undoes that, and that’s the power that the M-POWER initiative can bring to societies around the world,” Bader-Blau said.
M-POWER traces its origins to the first-ever Summit for Democracy, a gathering held in December 2021, where leaders from around the world came together to discuss the challenges and opportunities facing democracies today. There, President Joe Biden announced the Presidential Initiative for Democratic Renewal, a set of policy and foreign assistance initiatives that builds on the U.S. government’s ongoing work to support democracy and defend human rights around the globe. That includes supporting free and independent media, fighting corruption, and supporting activists, workers and reform-minded leaders.
However, the announcement for M-POWER’s launch also came on the heels of Biden signing a bill that blocked a national railroad strike. Some labor leaders criticized the move as the contract failed to meet workers’ demand for paid sick leave.
For Gupta, cross-sector collaboration is crucial to address a difficult problem. “We recognize that we have diverse problems, diverse challenges, but we agree in principle on workers’ freedom of association and the right to bargain. We agree that we need to support that, and we looked around the world and said that there was no single organization focused on building worker power, and we decided to create one,” Gupta said.
Governments, she said, have the diplomatic power and resources; worker organizations are able to ensure that workers’ voices guide M-POWER; and philanthropic organizations like Ford have “a nimbleness and an agility” to provide funding.
“We really believe that we’re in a new horizon,” Gupta said. “It’s a new progressive era on the horizon, one that really sees the rights and voices of workers as inextricably linked to democracy, and we’re just thrilled to be a part of helping to shape this new horizon.”