Partners for Dignity & Rights works with the worker center movement to build the power and participation of workers to enforce their right to work with dignity. So long as retaliation, intimidation, and discrimination are the standard way of doing business, low wage workers are stripped of any power to determine their conditions of work and, by extension, the conditions of their lives and that of their families. We seek to support workers to grow their power and to self-govern by putting workers at the center of enforcing existing workplace laws, as well as raising and shaping standards.

Based on a successful, long-term partnership with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers and development of the Fair Food Program, which has dramatically transformed conditions for workers throughout the U.S. tomato industry, Partners for Dignity & Rights now anchors the transnational Worker-driven Social Responsibility Network. Through the Network, we partner with workers’ organizations to advance enforcement models, like the Fair Food Program, the Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh, Milk with Dignity and the recent Agreement on Gender Justice in Lesotho Apparel that effectively ensure the human rights of workers at the bottom of product supply and labor contracting chains.  

We also work to advance public policy that enables workers to exercise their rights in the workplace and support efforts to create partnerships between workers’ organizations and government that shift power and improve conditions in low-wage workplaces. Our campaign partners include Centro de Trabajadores Unidos en la Lucha (CTUL), Migrant Justice, Chicago Workers’ Collaborative, Arise Chicago, Raise the Floor Alliance, and Venceremos.

For more information, check out:

• WSR-Network.org, the Worker-driven Social Responsibility Network’s website, which includes tools for practitioners.
• Challenging the Business of Fear: Ending Retaliation, Enforcing Workers’ Rights, our report with the Raise the Floor Alliance documenting the breakdown in workplace accountability manifest in widespread retaliation.   
• Temporary Work, Permanent Abuse: How Big Business Destroys Good Jobs, our report with the National Staffing Workers Alliance documenting how companies degrade blue-collar jobs through temp work arrangements.