Defending Workers Rights From Trauma to Empowerment.
[Music]
every day
three and a half billion people get up
and work
for some work will be a fulfilling
empowering well-paid experience
but for far too many work will be
unfulfilling underpaid and at times
unsafe and for those who speak up
and attempt to organize and improve
their conditions
they could be met with dismissals from
work
and for some for some who seek to defend
worker rights
in some of the darkest corners of the
global economy
they might be met with violence
i know because i almost lost my life
twice in my efforts to defend workers
rights
these experiences have shaped me
and motivated me for the last 20 years
in the research i do on workers rights
and efforts to address these abuses
in the late 1980s after studying in
boston and doing some union organizing
there i moved to el salvador
the country was in the midst of a
violent civil war trade unionists were
being arrested some were being tortured
my job was to document these abuses
with the hope that by getting the word
out this would provide
some degree of protection and we were
partly successful in this work in fact
these were some of the most
fulfilling years of my life every day
that i got up i felt the work
i was doing in some small way was
contributing to change
but then things got difficult for me
i was taken from my home in the early
morning hours by a military security
force
i was put in a basement detention center
a basement cell i was stripped to my
underwear blindfolded handcuffed i was
denied food
and water and forced to stay standing
for long periods of time
and asked about my worker rights
activism
i was released two days later
thanks to an international and national
campaign
friends and colleagues of mine were not
so lucky dozens who were detained around
the same time
were sent to prison
but then the very next month
the labor union office where i worked
was bombed at lunchtime
nine friends and colleagues were killed
that day
one of them was fabe elizabeth velazquez
phoebe was a garment worker
she rose up on the ranks and she became
a union organizer
she was also an outspoken critic of the
government
and the worker rights abuses in the
country
she was sitting with me when she was
killed
i barely survived receiving a severe
head injury
but you know what these extreme
experiences at that time
were not so exceptional in el salvador
in fact in the early years of the war
5125
labor rights activists were killed today
in countries such as guatemala and
colombia and beyond
worker rights advocates are still being
killed
i returned to the u.s i had some medical
procedures i studied for a bit got a
master’s degree
and then i returned to el salvador the
country was going through
an intense transition not only from war
to peace it was transitioning its entire
economic model
export processing zones industrial parks
full of garment factories
were mushrooming across the country
but with them so too were worker rights
violations
i became very involved in one campaign
in a factory called mandarin
where workers had been fired for trying
to form a union the campaign was
international
and it was eventually successful
i’ll never forget the day when i met
with those workers
in front of the factory gates and we
walked in together
and i watched them return to their
workplaces
and begin work again it was one of the
biggest success stories
for garment worker organizing in the
country the workers not only returned to
work they returned
with their union intact
but for me the euphoria would be
short-lived
a few days later three men broke into my
home one put a gun to my head another
put a gun to my chest
and they held me there and they were
waiting for the rush hour traffic to die
down so they could take me with them
luckily a neighbor saw what happened she
called the police when the police
eventually arrived
the three men fled i originally
tried to tell myself this was a
kidnapping attempt
but the police told me otherwise you see
the men made no attempt to cover their
faces
that was because they had no expectation
i would be around later
to identify them what happened to me
that day
was directly linked to my worker rights
advocacy and the return of those
unionists to their jobs
in the period that followed i started to
become more and more aware
of how these multiple traumas
experiences were starting to affect me
there’s this constant sense anxiety this
this sense of unease in my gut that i
just couldn’t get rid of
i always felt hyper vigilant i was on
alert all the time i just couldn’t
get that sensation away but i buried
myself in work
lots and lots of work to control those
sensations
i went back to the u.s i went to cornell
university i worked on getting a phd
i began publishing on worker rights i
then got a job at penn state
i began teaching on worker rights
publishing more on worker rights i was
getting awards and recognitions for my
work
in many ways it seemed like my life was
a tremendous success
a phd from cornell university a job as a
professor at a research one
institution
but deep inside i was still burning up
with anxiety
i was also increasingly suffering from
chronic headaches
they were becoming unbearable
eventually a primary care physician
suggested
we do a brain scan
what those brain scan results would show
would change my life
you see it turns out i have a condition
called chiari malformation
carry is when the skull is just a little
too small for the brain
many adults can have this condition and
be asymptomatic their entire lives
but if you have a brain injury a
concussion
like i did when the labor union office
was bombed what happens is
the brain expands with the concussion
but it has nowhere to go
and the brain tonsils herniate downward
and slowly
they block the flow of cerebral final
fluids
causing the chronic excruciating
headaches
in 2006 i had something called
decompression brain surgery
three neurosurgeons operated on me for
seven and a half
hours afterwards
the cerebral spinal fluids began to flow
again
and slowly very slowly
those chronic headaches that debilitated
me for so long
began to dissipate
afterwards i began a period of
reflection
and here’s one of my thoughts from that
period
when we go through such traumatic
experiences
we can either get pushed inward and the
world can become a very scary place
or if we allow them we can reflect on
them
and use those experiences to be a source
of empowerment
to give us vision and a deeper sense of
purpose
these processes are never easier than
never linear
but eventually for me with time
a lot of time i began to see how i could
use that process
i still continue to work hard but i do
so with a greater sense of calmness
and clarity and i also feel like
i can use and draw on my experiences
to very quickly identify and connect
with workers
and their stories of abuse
i continued my travel i went back to
latin america
i was in vietnam in bangladesh in india
everywhere i went i felt i could very
can
quickly connect with workers and their
stories of abuse
and i became almost obsessed with
finding the answer as a researcher the
answer to one very basic question
why is it if the global garment industry
generates billions of dollars in profits
every year
are worker rights abuses so endemic to
the sector
i began probing this argument with a
very simple data set
i started looking at the prices brands
and retailers were paying to make our
garments
and i found a continual decline
and then for those same countries for
the same period of time
i mapped out respect for workers rights
the correlation was really apparent as
brands squeezed down on prices
respect for worker rights declined
precipitously
i then became very interested in this
question of abuse at work
and what i was finding was that as the
prices got squeezed down
factory owners were demanding workers
work faster and faster
and faster they were being told to do 60
operations an hour to keep their jobs
and they had to do 80 operations to do
their jobs
in some cases they had to do 100
operations to keep their jobs
and when they couldn’t meet these
inhumane production targets
they were yelled at and at times hit
my research showed survey research that
64 percent of garment workers in india
experienced verbal abuse at work
these sourcing practices
my research showed were contributing to
gender-based violence at work
when the covet pandemic hit all these
trends were exacerbated and new
problems emerged we documented this in a
research report with the worker rights
consortium
and what we found was that brands and
retailers responded to covid
by abruptly canceling orders billions
and billions in dollars of
dollars of orders the impact on workers
and the factories was devastating
workers were sent home in many cases
without their severance pay without
salary
soon the majority of garment workers and
their families were reporting
cases of malnutrition
we then put up a public tracker which
showed which companies had paid up and
which companies had not paid up
very soon a movement emerged demanding
brands
pay up what was owed facebook twitter
media accounts instagram
lit up with the counts of the impact of
these cancellation on workers and their
lives
within months 22 billion
22 billion dollars were paid up
one longtime activist referred to this
as the single greatest
achievement for worker rights advocacy
in the garment sector in decades
i am now the founding director of a
research center
and a master’s program in global workers
rights with some of the most incredible
professors
and students from around the world i’m
working actively on campaigns for living
wages and respect for freedom of
association rights
through binding agreements
and here’s my take away from all of this
i believe we can all we can all tap into
our most trying experiences and use that
for our own sense of empowerment
to promote change
so my question for all of you today is
this
what experiences have impacted you in
your lives
and how might you use them for your own
sense of empowerment
purpose and clarity to contribute to
some of the changes
that this world so desperately needs
thank you very much