Source: Financial Times
For Shawna Bader-Blau the past year has been a gut punch. The executive director of the Solidarity Center has witnessed a major blow to labour rights, particularly in the garment industry, where some of the worst forms of human exploitation take place. The Solidarity Center is the largest US-based workers’ rights non-profit, and engages directly with trade unions and their members in more than 70 countries. Prior to last year, it had chalked up several fresh wins: improving access to protective equipment in Bangladesh, securing anti-harassment contract clauses in Indonesia and negotiating workplace heat stress agreements in Cambodia. All of that progress, Bader-Blau says, “stopped midstream” and, in some cases, “reversed overnight” after President Donald Trump signed an executive order freezing most forms of foreign aid last January. This included $577mn in grants for programmes that combated child and forced labour and improved labour standards.
Elon Musk, the putative head of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, boasted online that he had fed USAID (the US Agency for International Development) “into the wood chipper”.
The new administration described the cuts as part of a sweeping decision to slash federal spending while eliminating fraud and abuse. But they have devastated the Solidarity Center, which obtained 30 per cent of its roughly $80mn in annual funding from USAID and the State Department, and nearly 21 per cent from the Labor department’s Bureau of International Labor Affairs (ILAB). The formerly 400 person-strong organisation had to lay off more than half of its employees, downsize or close one-third of its 30-plus field offices, and abandon entire programmes. Legal clinics shut down, newly organised unions lost a foothold and workers forfeited tools and resources to hold employers accountable. As the Solidarity Center’s spending accounts ran dry, so too did those of downstream organisations that relied on its disbursements and are now scrambling to address what has become an existential threat. This is the case for Awaj Foundation, a grassroots organisation in Bangladesh that provides 600,000 garment workers with free legal and social services. Bangladesh’s interim government had expressed interest in reforming the country’s outdated labour laws to bring them more in line with international standards, when 30 per cent of the organisation’s funding vanished at a stroke of Trump’s pen. Awaj Foundation should have been increasing its lobbying for higher wages and better conditions for its members. Instead, it was forced to close seven of its 22 locations in Dhaka and Chittagong, and let 35 of its 150 employees go.
“How can we do our work without resources and capacity?” founder and executive director Nazma Akter asks. When funding is suddenly withdrawn, the ripple effects extend beyond having fewer organisers, fewer worker gatherings and less documentation of labour rights violations, says Marina Colby, who managed USAID’s $62.5mn Global Labor Program until the agency was wound up in July. Training in advocacy, negotiation and women’s leadership have also been hit. “We were witnessing measurable gains in the garment sector that are now at risk,” Colby says of the 23 collective bargaining agreements that USAID’s backing helped win for more than 27,000 Cambodian garment workers. “Losing this support is not just a programmatic setback, it’s a governance setback for the sector.” At a cabinet meeting in April, secretary of labour Lori Chavez-DeRemer bragged about saving US taxpayers $250mn by cancelling the ILAB grants. She described them as “foreign handouts” that included $3mn for “things like transparency and accountability for the Uzbekistan cotton industry”. Sitting nearby, Musk let out a small chuckle. “Some of these things are so ridiculous you can’t believe it,” he quipped. “Uzbek cotton farmers? It sounds like a comedy sketch.
But this was no joke to Abby McGill, senior programme officer at the Solidarity Center, which was two years into a four-year agreement with Uzbek companies and the country’s government to protect the country’s cotton supply chain workers from forced labour and other human rights violations.
It was only in 2022 that the International Labour Organization (ILO) had declared the central Asian nation’s biggest cash crop “free” of child and forced labour. Because conditions still don’t measure up to international standards of freedom of association, the risk of relapse remains high. “We no longer have any infrastructure on the ground at all in Uzbekistan,” McGill says. “As a result of those trainings, something like a dozen workers had applied those mechanisms to improve their conditions on the ground, to say, like, ‘My contract doesn’t meet Uzbek law’ or ‘My contract says this, but you’re not enforcing it’ — and now all of that is just gone.” Brands represented by the American Apparel & Footwear Association are even more wary of sourcing Uzbek cotton now that they’ve lost that extra layer of reassurance that the ILAB-funded programme would have provided. “It’s fine to say, ‘Well, there’s no forced labour in the cotton fields’ but there’s a lot more that we need nowadays from a due diligence perspective because of laws like the forced labour statute in the United States,” says Nate Herman, the trade group’s executive vice-president. Thea Mei Lee, former deputy under-secretary for international labour affairs under Joe Biden, thinks there’s a “wilful” misunderstanding of the work ILAB does, and USAID did, for labour protections worldwide. She also points out that undermining workers’ rights in other parts of the world erodes US businesses’ ability to compete with rivals that undercut their costs. “As a nation, we shouldn’t be accustomed to having prices that are low because of exploitation and oppression,” Lee says. “If a child was chained to a loom or beaten or mistreated or not fed so you could have a cheap T-shirt, then maybe you don’t want that T-shirt.
”As a nation, we shouldn’t be accustomed to having prices that are low because of exploitation and oppression" Thea Mei Lee, former US deputy under-secretary for international labour affairs
Several of the ILO’s factory monitoring and technical assistance programmes that benefited from ILAB funding, including Better Work Haiti and All Hands in Kenya: Advancing Labour Standards Through Cooperative Action, are statutorily required by trade agreements such as HOPE II and the US-Kenya Strategic Trade and Investment Partnership, she adds. Without those tools, working conditions could deteriorate, increasing risks for US business operations. Even trade agreements and frameworks recently negotiated by the White House with countries such as Cambodia, Malaysia and Vietnam have included provisions requiring their governments to be more proactive in preventing modern slavery and other labour abuses. But these commitments would be difficult to fulfil without technical assistance programmes funded by the US federal government. “Without enforceable mechanisms, concrete action plans and accountability measures, they risk being purely symbolic,” says Tharo Khun, programme manager at the Center of Alliance of Labor and Human Rights, a workers’ rights group in Cambodia. The garment industry is important from a labour rights perspective because of its size and spread, says Kelly M Fay Rodriguez, who served as lead diplomat for international labour policy in the Biden administration. But the sector has also incubated many of the leading models of workplace best practice, such as the Accord for Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh. Curtailing programme funding in the name of “America first” is completely misplaced, she says, and that levelling the playing field for workers can actually boost US trade. “You can’t actually defend or promote the rights of workers in the United States if you’re gutting protections and rights for them everywhere else in the world,” she says.