No Country on Earth Fully Respects Workers’ Rights, and It’s Getting Worse
Class warfare continues to be waged incessantly. And that war’s offensives continue to be more intense. In just the past year, the world’s working people have seen more attacks on the rights of free speech and assembly, more attacks on civil liberties, more arrests and imprisonments, more refusals to engage in collective bargaining with unions and more technology used to monitor, discipline and silence workers.
None of this new, but it is getting worse. The International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) has issued its 2026 Global Rights Index report, and has been the case in past years, the annual report makes for grim reading. Once again, no country on Earth fully protects workers’ rights.
In past years, there were only nine countries that met the qualifications for the best category, “sporadic violations of rights,” defined as where “Violations against workers are not absent but do not occur on a regular basis.” That was the case for the 2023 and 2022 reports. This year? Only eight countries were found to be merely “sporadic violations of rights.” Those countries are Austria, Denmark, Germany, Iceland, Ireland, Norway, Sweden and Uruguay, with Uruguay newly promoted to this level from a year ago.
Before we dip into the details, the larger picture is alarming. And the advanced capitalist countries, you won’t be surprised to know, are no exceptions. “In Europe and the Americas, workers’ rights are suffering an alarming decline. Both regions registered their worst average country rating since the Index began in 2014, and the increasing influence of the far right is putting workers and unions at risk in countries such as Argentina and France – two out of four countries to be downgraded in 2026,” the ITUC said in its report. Nor are the reasons behind these developments a mystery. “This year’s results reinforce the ITUC’s view that we are witnessing a global erosion of democratic principles – a ‘billionaire coup against democracy’ – funded by the rich and delivered by far-right and authoritarian leaders,” the report said. “As a snapshot of the violations of workers’ rights, the 2026 Index exposes a pattern that the powerful would rather keep hidden: the systematic weakening of democracy through attacks on workers, unions and collective bargaining. From repression of strikes to the erosion of legal protections and the criminalisation of unions, these are not isolated incidents but part of a broader strategy to silence dissent and entrench inequality.”
Fully half of the world’s national governments launched attacks on the rights to free speech and assembly, and half also arrested or detained workers, the highest total yet. Workers in three-quarters of the world’s countries had their right to union organizing impeded, also a record high, and 80 percent of countries restricted the right to collectively bargain. Worse still, 87 percent of countries violated the right to strike.
For the past decade, the number of countries that exclude workers from the right to establish or join a union, that violate the right to collective bargaining, that violate the right to strike, that arbitrarily arrest and detain trade union members, and that deny or constrain freedom of speech and assembly have all risen.
The global rise of hard right governments has gone hand-in-hand with the deterioration of workers’ rights. Argentina, where President Javier Milei has carried out his promise to impose the harshest variety of austerity that he can get away with, achieved the unprecedented “accomplishment” of falling in the ratings for two consecutive years. Argentina is now classified in the ITUC survey as a 5 rating, the worst category, representing the worst offenders where workers “have effectively no access to rights.” The ITUC lists Argentina has one of the world’s ten worst. “Milei has led a staunchly anti-union agenda since coming to power in 2023, undermining basic workers’ rights, civil liberties and union activity,” the Confederation reports. “Workers and unionists face systematic abuse and the shrinking of civic space. … Union offices, including the headquarters of the glassworkers’ union, were infiltrated and vandalised.” High union officials have fled the country after a police roundup. “Employers in Argentina engage in union busting and exploitative practices with impunity,” the report concludes.
In France, which also saw its rating decline, there is a “sustained deterioration of workers’ rights, an increasingly hostile political atmosphere, and incrementally regressive government policy since nationwide protests against pension reform deeply shook the political landscape in 2023.” Furthermore, in an atmosphere of the government attempting to impose regressive labor policies, “more than 1,000 Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT) activists have fallen foul of state and employer crackdowns and a spate of violent attacks by far-right groups.”
And what of the two countries that love to claim their defense of democracy is unwavering and endlessly point fingers at other countries? The United Kingdom was rated as a “regular violator of rights,” a ranking of 3, the middle of the five categories. That was actually an improvement from a year earlier, with the ITUC crediting the outgoing Starmer administration for “repeal[ing] excessive restrictions to industrial action introduced in the previous Conservative government’s 2016 Trade Union Act.” And the United States? Once again given a rating of 4, the category for countries that have “systematic violations of rights,” the second worst ranking.
“In 2025, Trump stripped collective bargaining rights from more than a million federal workers across more than 30 agencies — perhaps the biggest act of union busting in the nation’s history,” the report said. “The move, reserved in the past for emergencies, was portrayed by the Republican administration as being in the interest of national security. It means entire departments, such as the Departments of State and Justice, and even the Food and Drug Administration, are excluded from this basic right.” The ITUC also cited Trump leaving the federal labor arbitration body, the National Labor Relations Board, without a quorum so that no cases brought by unions can be heard, as well as imposing an intimidating environment for immigrant workers, the excessive force used by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and arbitrary arrests of union leaders. “The harm caused by these militarised enforcement practices extends well beyond these high-profile cases, as hundreds of other workers and trade unionists have been arrested and deported or detained in life-threatening conditions without charges or due process,” the report said.
The Global Rights Index ranks the world’s countries from 1 to 5, with 1 the best category, denoting “sporadic violations of rights,” defined as where “Violations against workers are not absent but do not occur on a regular basis.” Those are the aforementioned eight countries. (These are green on the report’s maps.)
Rating 2 countries are those with “repeated violations of rights,” defined as where “Certain rights have come under repeated attacks by governments and/or companies and have undermined the struggle for better working conditions.” Countries with this rating include Australia, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Portugal and Spain. (These are yellow on the report’s maps.)
Rating 3 countries are those with “regular violations of rights,” defined as where “Governments and/or companies are regularly interfering in collective labour rights or are failing to fully guarantee important aspects of these rights” due to legal deficiencies “which make frequent violations possible.” Countries with this rating include Belgium, Canada, Chile, France, Mexico, South Africa and Switzerland. (These are light orange on the report’s maps.)
Rating 4 countries are those with “systematic violations of rights,” defined as where “The government and/or companies are engaged in serious efforts to crush the collective voice of workers, putting fundamental rights under threat.” Countries with this rating include Brazil, Greece, Israel, Peru, the United States and Vietnam. (These are dark orange on the report’s maps.)
Rating 5 countries are those with “no guarantees of rights,” defined as where “workers have effectively no access to these rights [spelled out in legislation] and are therefore exposed to autocratic regimes and unfair labour practices.” Countries with this rating include Argentina, China, Colombia, Ecuador, India, the Philippines, Russia, South Korea and Turkey. (These are red on the report’s maps.) In addition, there are countries with a 5+ rating, those with “No guarantee of rights due to the breakdown of the rule of law.” The dozen countries listed here include Afghanistan, Myanmar, Syria and Yemen.
The ITUC determines its ratings by checking adherence to a list of 97 standards derived from International Labour Organization conventions. Those 97 standards pertain to civil liberties, the right to establish or join unions, trade union activities, the right to collective bargaining and the right to strike. As a self-described confederation of national trade union centers, it says it represents 191 million workers in 169 countries and has 340 national affiliates.
Outside the scope of the International Trade Union Confederation’s report is the ability of workers to even have a job. Unemployment statistics notoriously greatly understate the number of people out of work and ignore altogether those with part-time work who need a full-time job. Even those lesser known statistics, such as such as the U-6 in the United States and R8 in Canada, that reveal higher numbers because of a more expansive definition of counting unemployment than the standard measures, undercount. One estimate of the true rate of un- and under-employment is 24.3 percent, calculated by the Ludwig Institute for Shared Economic Prosperity. The International Labour Organization estimates that 2.1 billion workers are employed informally, far fewer than those with regular work. The ILO notes that “Informality is typically associated with lower job quality due to limited access to social protection, rights at work, workplace safety and job security.” And all this at a time when the gigantic sums of money shoveled into the pockets of billionaires and other capitalists is so high that there is not enough outlet for investment or other productive use, and instead the money is shoveled into financial speculation — the volume of trading in currency (foreign exchange), stocks, bonds and their derivatives exceeds the size of the global economy in 10 business days.
As we yet again have cause to note, class warfare is intensifying and remains decisively one-sided. For how long?
How Unions Pave the Way to the American Dream
Marcelo Assis recalled how his family arrived in the United States about 35 years ago, “poor as hell”—yet certain that America offered the path forward that they’d never find in their native Brazil or anywhere else.
The following years brought ups and downs, with Marcelo serving as a combat medic in the Army and then falling disillusioned with low-paying nonunion work that held him back instead of helping him move ahead.
But Marcelo ultimately landed back-to-back union jobs that catapulted him into the middle class and firmly anchored him there. Just as he clearly recalls his arrival in this country, Marcelo vividly remembers the moment years later when he looked around his newly purchased home, thought about the good life he provided to his family, and realized for the first time that he’d made it.
“This is the American dream,” he said to himself.
Marcelo’s experience shows how unions pave the way to a brighter future. That’s true even now—a time when the majority of working people feel as though the American dream has slipped out of reach because of rampant economic inequality, skyrocketing costs, and the callous indifference of the greedy rich.
In all, nearly 70 percent of Americans no longer see the country promising mobility or financial security to those who work hard and strive to get ahead, according to a January 2024 ABC News/Ipsos poll.
A separate survey, conducted in conjunction with the nation’s 250th birthday by AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, found that half of respondents lost faith in the American dream. Many see America working for the wealthy, not people like them.
But Marcelo, president of United Steelworkers (USW) Local 12000 and a mechanic at Southern Connecticut Gas, will be the first to say it doesn’t have to be this way. After helping him fulfill the American dream, the union now enables him to hold on to it.
A USW contract provides Marcelo with the good wages he needs to ride out Donald Trump’s inflationary economy, including the runaway costs of groceries, utilities, and house insurance. It affords him retirement security even as Republicans threaten to cut lifelines for the elderly.
The contract delivers quality, employer-sponsored health care, while more and more Americans today have no choice but to put off doctor’s visits or treatments because of the spiraling costs.
“There’s the stability of knowing you have benefits,” Marcelo said of the contract, which he and his coworkers negotiated. “You don’t have to worry.”
This is all fabulous. But it isn’t unique.
Union members across the country make significantly more money than their non-union peers. They’re also more likely to have family leave, paid time off, and work-life balance. This all adds up to cars in the garage, summer vacations, and sports leagues for the kids, along with all of the other pluses that make life worth living.
This is what independence looks like. Marcelo simply calls it the “union life.”
There’s more.
Because unions provide a voice on wages, safety, and other issues, they empower workers at a moment when a depressing sense of helplessness haunts many other Americans.
Union members also forge a bond that transcends the shop floor. Everyone looks out for everybody else, and that’s a formidable counterweight to the epidemic of loneliness and isolation also plaguing the country right now.
Even better, this shared identity galvanizes union members to fight together for the greater good and to assert an ownership stake in their communities, often through the kind of volunteer work and political advocacy that Local 12000 members do.
“Doing it together makes it a much easier climb than doing it by myself,” Marcelo said of the solidarity uniting hundreds of his coworkers.
It’s a message that’s resonating with the growing number of workers weary of working their tails off, only to fall further behind while the rich get richer.
Polls show record levels of support for unions, and workers in every part of the country are joining them to take the future into their own hands.
The American dream endures. We just have to stand together to claim it.
