Hitting the right note for the Red Card to Child Labour Campaign

Posted on 26 June 2014 by ILO Blog

Rosalind Yarde, acting head of the ILO’s Advocacy and Campaigns unit

The launch date was set in stone. 12 June; World Day Against Child Labour; opening day of the football World Cup. With just months to go, we were looking for a big idea that would enable us to harness the power of communications to reach traditional and new audiences with a strong message about the 168 million children in child labour.

We had not planned on using that most ancient way of expression – music – but through our artists’ engagement programme, Artworks, we learnt that a US musician, Mike Einziger, was interested in the ILO’s work and wanted to contribute. He is the Grammy-nominated lead guitarist for the rock band, Incubus, who wrote the guitar riff for one of the biggest pop songs of 2013, Wake Me Up. We set up a meeting and he told us he wanted to write us a song about child labour. Download the song | Learn about the campaign
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How Haitian workers are getting a handle on job safety

Posted on 25 April 2014 by ILO Blog

Rolf Berthold, Enterprise Advisor, Better Work Haiti

When you’re up against a challenge as big as improving conditions for workers in Haiti’s garment sector, it’s easy to lose sight of the progress being made and focus on the problems. Risks to health and safety are still among the biggest. More than three in four factories in Haiti don’t meet the requirements for emergency preparedness.

I work as an Enterprise Advisor for Better Work Haiti. It’s my job to assess factories and help workers and employers to solve problems and improve working conditions. When we first started operations in 2009, the words “Occupational Safety and Health” weren’t in the vocabulary here. When talking to workers and managers about the basics of how to keep safe, we were often starting from scratch. Continue reading →

Fair play: decent work for early childhood educators

Posted on 17 April 2014 by ILO Blog

Oliver Liang, Education sector specialist in the ILO’s Sectoral Activities Department

Many years ago, when my kids were small, my wife and I used to leave them at the local day care centre so that we could go to work. Our families lived far away and it’s hard to imagine how we both could have kept working without that vital service.

Every day, millions of working parents around the world do the same thing, entrusting their children to early childhood education (ECE) personnel in crèches, nursery schools and day care centres. It’s no surprise that many countries around the world are investing heavily in it. Continue reading →