Women labor leaders from around the world join ILRF’s Women’s Rights in the Apparel Industry Conference.

This Mother’s Day, we are calling for what moms really need – decent wages to help them support their families and dignified, safe working conditions. We’ve got inspiring stories from working moms to share, and ideas of what to get for moms who care about moms everywhere.

Last week, we heard moving, inspiring presentations by four women labor leaders from Honduras, Cambodia and Bangladesh at ILRF’s Women’s Rights in the Apparel Industry Conference.

All of these women spoke about their struggle and determination to secure better working conditions for apparel industry workers, the majority of whom are women. The youngest member of the group, Vilma Gomez, is a 26-year old mother of four, who had to organize a neighborhood network to take care of her young children so that she could participate in the conference. She said she took this on because she really wanted to learn from the experience and take that back to help strengthen her union and her co-workers and to build a better life for her children.

Help your hard-working mom show she’s part of the movement with this “We Can All Do It” t-shirt.

If your mom prefers something sweet, consider some fairtrade chocolate to note Fairtrade Day tomorrow. We especially like chocolate companies that develop close, mutually beneficial relationships with the farmers who grow their cocoa, like Equal Exchange and Divine.

After years of campaigning, the major chocolate companies are finally tracking their cocoa supply and certifying producers as part of their efforts to stop child labor. Most of these initiatives, however, continue to ignore the need to ensure decent livelihoods for farmers so they can afford to keep their children in school. Fairtrade, in our view, is the best solution we have right now to secure a premium price for farmers’ cocoa and to help farmers organize to improve their community and gain more control over the price they receive for their crop.

Fairtrade’s farmer organizing has laid the groundwork for farmer communities to come together around projects such as building schools in Ivory Coast, Ghana and other countries around the world. I met the woman pictured here during a trip to cocoa farms in Cote D’Ivoire. She didn’t get very far in school because she was busy working, but has higher hopes for her child. ILRF continues advocating for solutions that get at the root causes of child labor, support a dignified life for mothers and fathers, and break the cycle of poverty. Learn more by ordering a DVD of The Dark Side of Chocolate, a feature film that uncovers terrible working conditions on cocoa plantations in Ghana and Cote d’Ivoire, or support ILRF’s work with farmers in Cote d’Ivoire in honor of your mom.

In solidarity,
Judy Gearhart
International Labor Rights Forum