Workers Standing up for Their Rights Around the World

Inside the Winter of Discontent for India's Gig Workers

Gig workers in India are staging protests to speak out against the harsh working conditions they experience. Drivers, for example,  have to work long hours, often 20 hours a day, to make enough money to get by, and do not receive social security benefits employees in other industries are guaranteed.

The pandemic only worsened the situation for the more than 15 million gig workers in the country. While the rest of the world shut down, gig workers were forced to remain on the job in order to support themselves, risking exposure and infection. And when restrictions were lifted, their conditions didn’t improve, leading them to organize and protest. 

Read about the ways gig workers are exploited and their fight to receive fair compensation  here  

Without wages in 2022, journalists from Diario de Pernambuco protest during Lula's interview with Radio Clube

Northern Brazil’s Diário de Pernambuco, the oldest newspaper in circulation in Latin America, came under fire last year for not paying its workers. Employees of the newspaper didn’t receive their wages for as much as six months. 

The situation is not unique, as traditional media outlets everywhere suffer financially. However, it has been worsened by provisional measure MP 1045/21, which makes labor laws more flexible in order to spur  the Brazilian economy in the wake of COVID-19. Companies are taking advantage of this provision in order to postpone paying workers.

The attention that employees drew to their situation helped to push the owners of the newspaper to pay what they owed. But as Report for the World corps member Giovanna Carneiro chronicles, the delays in payment started anew in 2022, prompting employees to go on strike between February 9th and February 10th and use an interview with former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva to flood social media with posts spreading awareness about their situation.

Read their story in Portugese  here .  (To read the story in English, use  Google Chrome  or    Safari  translation extension.)

Why Young, Overworked Doctors are Protesting Outside the Health Ministry

Young medical professionals took to the streets outside the Union Health Ministry in India in December 2021 to protest the postponement of academic counseling for 50,000 medical students, the last step before they can start their junior residency.

Report for the World corps member Banjot Kaur explains that the delay of this exam, caused by a lack of coordination between ministries, means that the already short staffed hospitals of the country won’t receive new trainees until the second semester of 2022, increasing the hours for doctors and reducing the quality of care.

Read  here  about the ongoing protests and how the situation arose. 

The One Profession where Men are Demanding Equality

In India, nursing is considered an unacceptable profession for men to join, as it is widely thought to be women’s work. Therefore, it is dominated by women, and when men try to become nurses they are met with many obstacles. Scroll.In talks to Samuel Sath, a 28 year old male nurse who has had to fight to get his position. 

Sath is unable to get a place at any of Mumbai’s nursing schools because they only let in women, and found it exceedingly hard to find a job. When the pandemic struck, because there was such an immense need for healthcare workers, men and women alike were hired by hospitals. But at non-COVID hospitals, he has been repeatedly denied employment on the basis of his gender. 

Worsening matters, at least two health directories of Indian states have issued quotas for nursing jobs that dictate that 80-90% of jobs must go to women. Male and female nurses alike have spoken out against this with calls for gender equality across the field of nursing. 

Read  here  about the gendered ideas of caregiving that discourage men from becoming nurses, the challenges male nurses face, and what they are doing to overcome them.

Why One Man Left his Job at a Rolls Royce to Become a Healthcare Recruiter

In some cases, even people with college degrees can find themselves struggling, particularly if they are immigrants.   After getting a job working at a Rolls Royce engineering facility in the United Kingdom, Ben Kuti left the engineering sector to work as a cleaner for a care facility. 

Although it is regarded as a job for the uneducated, Kuti makes higher wages, and has started to recruit Nigerian workers, in order to help them stabilize themselves as they arrive in a new country. 

Report for the World corps member Chiamaka Okafor  tells the story of Kuti  and how this once looked down upon job is helping many Nigerians in the UK by allowing them to have a living wage.

The Migrants Who Never Went Back

Many young women in rural India have longed to leave their small towns, and begin working in order to become independent. The growing garment industry in Tamil, Nadu, in the south of the country,   promised paying jobs to achieve that dream. But when women arrived to work as sewers, they discovered that the jobs offered  substantially less money than  promised, and had to work in poor conditions. 

When the government ordered lockdowns due to the pandemic, these women were unable to leave their hostels to go back home, waiting months to reunite with their families. Report for the World corps member Aarefa Johari spoke with many of the women who left their homes looking for a better life and had to come back disillusioned. 

Read  here  to hear the story of the women who were excited to gain employment at factories, but traded them to return to their families.

Jailed for Keeping Mumbai Clean

In Mumbai, sanitation workers are employed in one of two ways: Some receive welfare benefits, higher wages, and the security of a government job. However, the rest are hired indirectly, and receive lower wages, no benefits, and work on short-term contracts.

Contracted workers and their union have been battling in court to become eligible for permanent contracts  for the last twenty years with mixed success.

Report for the World corps member Aarefa Johari tells the story of a contract worker who along with other 580 of his colleagues, fought for his right to a stable job, but instead was demoted by his company and designated as a “volunteer” not subject to a legal minimum wage.  

The sanitation workers’ protests against this unfair treatment ended in them being carted away by police, and imprisoned for as long as three weeks in a case that illustrates the unwillingness of companies to regularize their workforce.

Read  here  for more information about the sanitation worker's fight for fair positions.

Nigeria's Academic Staff Union of Universities Goes on Strike

The Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU), which represents Nigerian university academic staff, is in the midst of a four week strike over several issues. Their demands include that the Nigerian government make a revitalization effort in public universities, as well as a replacement for the current Payroll and Personal Information system, which they say have led to fraud and inconsistencies. 

There have been several meetings to negotiate a deal, but almost a month into the strike no progress has been made. The ASUU has said it will not resume work until the government agrees to rework an agreement made in 2009 between the two parties. The Minister of Education in response has set a three month deadline to a recently formed committee that is renegotiating the 2009 agreement, but the ASUU says that until their demands are met they will not end their strike.

Read  here  for coverage of how the ASUU's strike is going, and why it's so necessary.