Workers’ rights across every continent in the world are in a “freefall”, according to the 2025 Global Rights Index released by the International Trade Union Confederation, the largest trade union federation in the world.
The index noted workers’ rights and democracy around the world are often under attack by “far-right politicians and their unelected billionaire backers. Whether it’s Donald Trump and Elon Musk in the US or Javier Milei and Eduardo Eurnekian in Argentina, we see the same playbook of unfairness and authoritarianism in action around the world.”
In the US, the index cited “the Donald Trump administration has taken a wrecking ball to the collective labour rights of workers and brought anti-union billionaires into the heart of policymaking”.
These actions, according to the index, include stripping union protections from 47,000 workers at the Transportation Security Administration, attempting to revoke civil service protections for large swaths of federal employees and firing a member of the National Labor Relations Board, leaving it without a quorum.
Luc Triangle, secretary general of the International Trade Union Confederation, said the report covers events up until March 2025, but these trends have continued to worsen in the US since then.
The Trump administration has also drastically cut staff at the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service, fired a board member of the Federal Labor Relations Authority and issued an executive order revoking collective bargaining rights for the majority of federal employees.
“In more and more countries, we have elected leaders that once they are elected democratically, they are taking action against democratic values,” said Triangle. “The first target of those leaders in many countries is they attack trade human rights and workers’ rights, because we are the biggest defenders of democratic values and in that sense also their biggest opponents as largest social movement in the world.”
Three out of five global regions saw conditions for workers’ rights worsen, including the Americas and Europe hitting their worst scores on the index since it was established in 2014.
Only seven out of 151 nations surveyed by the index had a top-tier rating on workers’ rights, down from 18 in 2015.
Workers’ access to justice was restricted in 72% of nations surveyed, the worst on record, 87% of countries violated the right to strike and 80% violated the right to collective bargaining.
The worst countries for workers, according to the report, are Bangladesh, Belarus, Ecuador, Egypt, Eswatini, Myanmar, Nigeria, the Philippines, Tunisia and Turkey.
Only three countries, Australia, Mexico and Oman, saw their ratings improve from 2024.
Triangle warned that the billionaire backers of these politicians have come out of the shadows and only expanded their wealth and control over important parts of society, in a “coup” by billionaires of democratic institutions globally that are driving these deteriorating conditions for workers’ rights.
“In the last four or five years with Covid and increased inflation, people lost purchasing power and that’s the breeding ground for extremist parties to get voters to vote for extremist parties, which actually don’t offer any solution for the working people,” said Triangle.
The federation of unions is pushing a campaign for democracy that delivers in opposition to the framework model used by Donald Trump and Elon Musk in the US, and other billionaires and far-right political leaders around the world.
“The five richest people in the world more than doubled their wealth over the last five years, while 60% of the population of the world got poorer. We are investing nearly US$3tn as a world into arms and into weapons and there is unfair taxation. So if we want to find the money for delivering to working people to what they really need – good wages, more jobs, rights, social protections – it’s a matter of political choice.”
