If the Solidarity Center folds, it won’t be for lack of trying, said Shawna Bader-Blau, executive director of the international labor rights nonprofit, the largest headquartered in the United States that partners directly with workers and their unions.
“Not if I have anything to do with it,” she said. “We’re still completely, 100 percent dedicated to the programs that we continue to have, despite being half our size, that produce the kind of change that makes a really big difference for working families all over the world.”
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Bader-Blau was speaking shortly after a federal judge ruled earlier this month that its lawsuit challenging the U.S. Department of Labor’s sudden termination of the Bureau of International Labor Affairs-administered grants—the same ones that underpinned a raft of its worker rights programs—could move forward in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.
The rescission of funding, which an April complaint described as “unlawful,” stripped the Solidarity Center of $78 million that would have accounted for 20 percent of its financing over multiple years. This is money that would have promoted freedom of association in Mexico, strengthened labor law enforcement in Georgia and tackled forced labor in Uzbekistan. The Labor Department, led by Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer, has characterized the programs as using Americans’ tax dollars to “bankroll foreign handouts.” In its opposition to the lawsuit the following month, it said that the claims “suffer from jurisdictional and substantive defects” and should therefore be dismissed.
The case is unusual, but so are the circumstances under which it manifested, said Stephanie Garlock, attorney at Public Citizen Litigation Group, which filed the lawsuit on behalf of the Solidarity Center and its fellow plaintiffs Global March Against Child Labour and the American Institutes for Research.
“Never before has the change of an administration wiped the slate entirely clean with just a fig-leaf justification to cancel all of these really important projects that matter, not only to our partners like the Solidarity Center, but also to workers across the globe,” she said. “And we see this as part of a pattern of mass impoundment of funds for projects that Congress wanted the agency to carry out for the benefit of workers abroad and at home.”
And while the Solidarity Center wasn’t granted immediate emergency relief, being able to press its claims is still an important win, Garlock said, especially since the cessation of the programs represents “real” concerns regarding compliance with appropriations law and the U.S. Constitution. Judge Beryl Howell’s opinion was that the record the plaintiffs pieced together from public statements and their own knowledge was insufficient to make a decision either way. Now, both they and the defendants have to come up with a proposal to lay out possible next steps in the litigation process.
“There’s not often full-blown discovery, but what happens as the first step is that the government will have to produce what’s called an administrative record that shows what information it has before it and how it made the decision,” Garlock said. “And our view is that that’s really important to begin understanding what the government did and provide some of those answers that Justice Howell was looking for.”
But a lot of the damage has already been inflicted through widespread layoffs and furloughs and the downsizing or closure of most of the Solidarity Center’s field offices, Bader-Blau said. Another 30 percent of its funding stemmed from the U.S. Agency for International Development, better known as USAID. The agency’s dismantling by the Department of Government Efficiency in February—fed “into the wood chipper,” as billionaire Elon Musk, the pseudo-agency’s then-putative head, remarked—has made clawing back any of that cash a non-starter.
“And the bigger impact of that, of course, is on the work and the programs,” she said. “It’s only three and a half months in, but we’re already seeing the beginnings of a pretty devastating set of rollbacks in progress that was being made under these programs.”
Uzbekistan is one such example. Bader-Blau said that a line can be drawn between the axing of a four-year agreement to bolster the agency and rights of cotton supply chain workers and recent state investigations of individuals involved in monitoring the sector for potential forced labor. That’s a “direct retaliation” that would not have happened if the Solidarity Center’s protocol was ongoing, she said, adding that “withdrawing these programs sends a signal to governments that the U.S. government doesn’t care about the issues and won’t hold them accountable.”
Other countries have also seen “pretty significant rollbacks” in progress on collective bargaining and unionization after losing the tools that the Solidarity Center imbued them with, such as legal aid and technical assistance, she said. Such backsliding has implications for American workers who will be left at an even greater competitive disadvantage because exploitation that cheapens dignity also cheapens labor costs.
“Two contracts that were being negotiated in Guatemala and Colombia have completely stalled; the employers are basically no longer bargaining in good faith,” Bader-Blau said. “That’s only three months in from the terminations. I hate to think what it’s going to look like in another six. When we take a hit to our programs and our infrastructure, a lot of the global labor movement also takes a big hit.”
The Solidarity Center has been able to access previously withdrawn funds from the National Endowment for Democracy, a quasi-autonomous grant-making organization that filed a lawsuit against executive branch agencies and officials in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia in March, releasing money that accounts for more than half of the nonprofit’s annual expenditures.
Other options for financing, such as private foundations and national developmental funds, are vanishingly few. And while the fashion brands that benefited reputationally or operationally from beefier labor rights in their sourcing countries have signed letters of support for the canceled programs, none have stepped up with financial offers.
“The lack of investment in significant labor rights programs, particularly in the global majority countries, is a bit shameful, to be honest,” Bader-Blau said. “And we have worked over many years in a big coalition to try to raise awareness about the need for that kind of investment.”
If anything, the fact that the United States is pulling back on its democratic commitments should serve as a wake-up call for greater global solidarity, she added.
“Democracy that works for normal people is one that delivers economic benefit and opportunity to everyone, and labor movements are central to that,” she said. “We all see ourselves as connected in that struggle.”
