"NOW IN ITS 11TH YEAR,
the Global Rights Index offers an important status report on the worldwide struggle to defend and exercise core pillars of democracy: the fundamental rights and freedoms of working people and trade unions.
As it attests, there are clear signs that governments and companies are accelerating their efforts to trample on these basic rights that underpin the very nature of democracy and the rule of law.
At a time when workers worldwide are increasingly faced with impossible daily choices, such as whether to feed their children or clothe them, they are being failed by their governments and their leaders. As millions of households struggle in a debilitating scenario of squeezed incomes and an entrenched cost-of-living crisis, policymakers and business leaders are actively restricting workers' rights to collectively demand fairer wages or to legally exercise their right to strike.

With repeated calls for fair wages and conditions going unheard and governments taking a wrecking ball to the right to strike and collective bargaining, workers' faith in democracy is crumbling. In a year where four billion people globally will participate in elections, right-wing authoritarians are circling, singling out easy scapegoats to blame in the run-up to elections and forwarding an anti-worker agenda of their own to put into play beyond them. Democracy hangs in the balance.

Almost nine out of 10 countries worldwide violated the right to strike, while about eight in 10 countries denied workers the right to bargain collectively for better terms and conditions. In a deeply worrying development this year, 49% of countries arbitrarily arrested or detained trade union members, up from 46% in 2023, while more than four in 10 countries denied or constrained freedom of speech or assembly.

These figures and trends reinforce a global picture in which hard-won democratic rights and civil liberties are under grave and relentless attack. That is why, this year, the ITUC launched its For Democracy campaign in support of the rights and freedoms that all individuals should enjoy without fear of persecution or oppression."

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