employees

The Human Rights Education Program for Women in Turkey

bharris — Fri, 25 May 2007 20:08:18 -0500

The Human Rights Education Program for Women in Turkey

By Liz Ervecik Amado

Download full notebook in english and a brief summary of the notebook in Russian and Armenian below. [*note]

In this notebook we learn about how effective and beneficial building collaborative relationships with government institutions can be to advancing human rights education. Women for Women’s Human Rights (WWHR)-New Ways in Turkey gained the support and use of government resources for furthering human rights education of women at the local level.

WWHR-New Ways developed a highly successful human rights education curriculum for women but needed an accessible, structured and sustainable way to reach women in need of learning about their rights. They found and developed an excellent partnership through government run, local level community centers. These community centers offered not only professional social workers who could be trained by WWHR-New Ways in facilitating the human rights education curriculum, but also a safe and accessible place for women to learn about their rights. We hope this notebook will provide ideas and insights for others as they seek opportunities for building mutually beneficial and sustainable relationships with government bodies for furthering human rights efforts.

*Note: You need Adobe Acrobat Reader to open the files marked with an asterisk (*). You can download a free version of this program from www.adobe.com.

Human Rights and the Corporation

bharris — Fri, 25 May 2007 20:08:03 -0500

Human Rights and the Corporation

by Reed Addis

Download full notebook below. [*note]

In this notebook Reed Addis describes the development of the Human Rights Compliance Assessment by the Danish Institute for Human Rights. The Compliance Assessment, based somewhat on the model of an Environmental Impact Assessment, was developed through a long process of consultation with businesses from many different industrial sectors, and provides a framework through which businesses can assess their human rights obligations and measure the liabilities and human rights risks in countries where they operate or plan to locate. The tool helps companies understand human rights law, but can also help human rights groups understand companies and learn to communicate with the corporate world about human rights questions in a more constructive way.

In 1999, a small project was initiated between the Danish Institute for Human Rights and the Danish Confederation of Industries. Their goal was to create an assessment tool companies could use to evaluate potential violations of human rights in their operations. Up until that point, businesses who were looking for human rights guidance in most cases found only information about labor law, for example via the International Labor Organization. The Human Rights Compliance Assessment was designed to fill this void. It has several sections, with the bulk of the document made up of 350 questions a company needs to ask itself. The questions were designed to cover the entire breadth of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

While governments are ultimately responsible for upholding the human rights afforded us by various international treaties, businesses can have a disproportionate impact on the activities of governments, either supporting or undercutting government actions. Over the last 20 to 30 years, a wealth of examples have been collected that demonstrate that companies can help protect the rights of individuals, or they can deal them devastating blows. Human rights advocates have accordingly begun to invest energy in focusing attention on the conduct of corporations, to push them to behave better, on occasion pulling them along to better human rights in their operations. This developing focus has been critical to adding protections for our human rights. But why this focus now? Over the last 50 years, corporations have increasingly extended their operations beyond the country where they are headquartered. This means a corporation with headquarters in one country may sell their products in several countries, while the products they sell may be made in yet another country thousands of miles away.

Many factors have contributed to this dynamic, but it is obvious that the production and marketing strategies of today are fundamentally different than they were a half century ago. Numerous international treaties, conventions and declarations identify human rights that governments and all members of society should uphold. Several international organizations, such as the International Labor Organization, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and the United Nations Global Compact, have also spelled out human rights obligations specific to private companies. However, if an advocacy group wishes to engage a corporation in a constructive dialogue on the issue of human rights, they must know both "languages": the language of the business world and that of international human rights law. Without this capacity, advocates are left discussing what seem to their corporate contacts like very vague concepts. These discussions may or may not lead to agreements and often refer to rather ambiguous changes for business operations or structure. It is clear to me after many meetings with human rights advocates that they often struggle to identify concrete changes they can offer to a corporation for improviving human rights protections.

This paper will outline how a new assessment tool, the Human Rights Compliance Assessment, designed at the Danish Institute for Human Rights, can help advocacy organizations confront human rights abuses linked to corporate activities and help corporations assess their own human rights performance. To understand the importance of this tool, we need to reframe human rights issues as "the company problem" and look for windows of opportunity to help corporations address these issues more productively. Taking advantage of these opportunities requires a willingness to see the problems through the business lens and to build alliances that will be credible in the eyes of the business community. NGOs who get involved in this task need to establish their own credibility and build trust, so that businesses can engage in dialogue and implement changes without the fear that their efforts will be used against them.

*Note: You need Adobe Acrobat Reader to open the files marked with an asterisk (*). You can download a free version of this program from www.adobe.com.

Engaging the Media: Building support for minimum wage reform

bharris — Fri, 25 May 2007 20:08:01 -0500

by Jee Hyeon Kim, Korean Women Workers Associations United (KWWAU)

Download full notebook below. [*note]

The KWWAU and its partners effectively engaged media to raise public awareness and concern regarding the minimum wage system, thereby assisting in the creation of a social movement that has succeeded in changing the minimum wage law to afford greater protections for workers, especially for women.

This tactical notebook shares the efforts of Korean Women Workers Associations United (KWWAU) to engage the South Korean media to build public awareness about South Korea’s unjust minimum wage system. As you will see, this was one of many coordinated tactics employed in their campaign to change the minimum wage law and system in order to provide living wages to the most vulnerable workers.

Successful engagement of the media most often requires many other supporting tactics. KWWAU shares the approaches they found were most helpful in engaging the media: credible documentation of the problem, petitions to demonstrate public interest in the issue, and visually engaging performances and demonstrations that are easily captured by the media. With media interest, our campaign was able to expand, bring in new supporters, and provide us with leverage in our negotiation and lobbying efforts.

In the aftermath of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) crisis in 1997 there was a swift increase in the numbers of poor workers in South Korea and the minimum wage re-emerged as a social issue. The greatest victims of globalization in South Korea were women, like other countries funded by the IMF, many Korean workers were laid off and transformed into irregular workers.

Prior to the use of this tactic, the KWWAU was involved in organizing subcontract women workers to advocate for their rights. In the process of their labor organizing work with this segment of irregular workers in 2000, they discovered the problem of the minimum wage system. The low minimum wage had become an urgent problem, particularly among subcontract workers in South Korea. KWWAU determined they needed to work to raise the increment of the minimum wage so subcontract women workers would benefit. KWWAU began organizing nation-wide campaigns in nine cities, resulting in the first challenge to the Korean minimum wage system since its inception in 1988. Beginning in 2002, other organizations joined the KWWAU in advocating for improvements in the minimum wage system. A "minimum wage network" was established. The campaign expanded to other regions, focusing on raising the minimum wage and transforming the minimum wage system itself.

The KWWAU’s efforts have resulted in significant changes to the minimum wage law that improves working conditions for minimum wage earners. Their efforts have also transformed the annual decision of the Minimum Wage Council into an important social issue in South Korea. The KWWAU and its partners succeeded in raising public awareness and concern regarding the minimum wage system, and creating a social movement that has made it possible for many poor women to benefit from increasing minimum wages and greater protections.

*Note: You need Adobe Acrobat Reader to open the files marked with an asterisk (*). You can download a free version of this program from www.adobe.com.