Democracy at Work Fund - Connecting Workers Across Sectors and Geographies

April 25, 2025

Democracy at Work Fund - Connecting Workers Across Sectors and Geographies

By Maeve Galvin, Program Director, Democracy at Work Fund & Elias Hakim, Program Associate

Cape Town, South Africa was the awe-inspiring, culturally rich setting for a unique gathering of grassroots labor rights activists, representing 18 organizations from 10 countries. This seemingly unlikely cohort, working to support diverse groups, including street cleaners in Bangladesh, content moderators in Kenya and farmers in Brazil were the inaugural Democracy at Work Fund partners, kindly brought together by Porticus for a four-day peer learning retreat in order to build connections in the labor movement across geographies and sectors, and for organizations to learn from each others’ unique context, strategies, wins, and challenges.

Our hosts, JASS (Just Associates), a feminist organization focused on changing the beliefs and structures that drive inequality and the destruction of our environment, facilitated the retreat, utilizing the methodology of feminist popular education. This approach helped break down barriers and allowed the participants to open themselves up to learning, sharing, and deeply connecting with one another. JASS, who have a team based in South Africa, grounded the retreat in the history of labor organizing in Cape Town - and didn’t shy away from exposing us to enduring struggles in South Africa.

At a time when labor and social justice movements face immense challenges, hope can be in short supply. However, activists are fundamental optimists, and it didn’t take long for participants to delve in - sharing their contexts and experiences, strategizing together, supporting one another. Participants shared that they found the experience energizing and even therapeutic. This groundbreaking event took place in the complex, beautiful setting of Cape Town — a city where the labor movement helped dismantle apartheid, one of the most significant social justice transformations in living memory. Holding the retreat here felt particularly symbolic. It acted as a reminder of the power that the labor movement holds when fuelled by solidarity and momentum.

Here’s what else we learned and observed about the global labor movement over the course of a rich retreat:

The same repression tactics are used across contexts.

Many participants shared context about the gravity and difficulty of their work including examples of brutal tactics by authorities and employers. Common themes included divide and conquer techniques, which were cited as an effective means of countering worker solidarity - particularly dividing more vulnerable workers such as women or migrants into different categories and having them experience different pay and conditions. In addition, where worker organizations are advocating to multi-national employers, there is a trend of their national governments prioritizing the threat of losing international investment to neighbouring countries above worker welfare. Labor rights are rarely just labor rights. Many participants shared contextual examples of insufficient labor rights having a knock-on effect on civic, economic, gender and climate justice.

Precarity is increasing everywhere.

The rise of informal work is not just a trend for newer industries but the practice of stripping workers of their formality (and therefore their benefits and protections) is increasing across traditional industries too. Increasing informality has the effect of repressing workers from advocating and unionising. For example, the union of hospital support staff in Malaysia saw their membership drop by thousands of workers in response to an informalization process that included subcontracting of contracts and loss of benefits.

Flexible definitions of worker organizations are key.

Some of the organizations working with informal workers cited their exclusion by the formal unions working at national level or the larger unions paying lip service to working with them. There was broad agreement on the need to have a flexible approach to operate and organize workers in particular contexts and allow for a broad definition of ‘worker organizations’ covering many forms of solidarity.

As is the need for creative approaches towards recruiting members.

There was much discussion of creative organizing techniques and servicing worker members. The Union of Informal Workers Associations from Ghana gave the example of organising workers around Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) during COVID. The Uganda Nurses & Midwives Union talked about creating a mobile app to organise new members. Parittran, the sanitation workers organization in Bangladesh, created a national database which proved effective for organizing this group of informal workers. The Cooperativo Ladran Sancho in Argentina has created a digital platform for sharing news and information, as well as serving as an organizing space for press workers.

Participants saw great value in building international solidarity with one another across countries and sectors.

An “international workers’ campaign” was the idea participants shared the most enthusiasm for on the final day of activities. For example, the organization supporting nickel workers in Indonesia, Bersama Sembada sees an opportunity to connect with mining workers in Congo who are mining other materials such as cobalt needed for the production of electric vehicle batteries to advocate to the international auto industry. There was a request to continue the digital working group to keep partners connected and for FORGE to develop other forms of cross-learning to enable the group to become a community of practice going forward.

Finally, the Democracy at Work grant funding has been a lifeline for many organizations in our first cohort.

The necessity of the Democracy at Work funding was mentioned by multiple partners who cited their struggles in seeking resourcing. Philanthropic funding was cited by many as having an important role in allowing worker organizations to test new ideas and see what works.

This retreat demonstrated the vital role played by the Democracy at Work Fund — the first and only pooled fund for the labor movement in the Global Majority. It supported nascent and informal organizations providing direct support to workers, opened new doors for building solidarity across geographies and sectors, and left us and our partners energized to continue shifting power in the global economy. We look forward to continuing this journey as we work to build the future of the Democracy at Work Fund.

Thank you to Porticus, JASS, our inaugural Democracy at Work Fund grantee partners, and the administrators of the inaugural funding round, Fundación Avina, for making this incredible work possible.

FORGE is a collaborative of philanthropic donors working to advance a global economy that works for all. The Democracy at Work Fund is an initiative born out of FORGE and supported by pooled funding from our members, including Laudes Foundation, Open Society Foundations, Ford Foundation, Humanity United.