Let’s develop decent work strategies to defend workers’ rights – GIMPA Rector1 min read
Professor Samuel Kwaku Bonsu, Rector, Ghana Institute of Management and Public Administration, has called on researchers and authorities to develop comprehensive decent work strategies to defend workers’ rights.
He said the protection of human rights and prioritizing the interests of workers were key to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
The Rector said this in Accra at a research project conference on the topic, “Realising the SDGs: The Role of Responsible Business,” funded by DANIDA through the Danish Institute for Human Rights.
The project focused on four streams of research, decent work in the artisanal mining industry in Ghana, child labour in the cocoa industry in Ghana; Non-judicial remediation of private sector human rights in Ghana; and a National Plan of Action on business and human rights in Ghana.
Presenting on the topic ” Decent Work and Precarity in Ghana’s Artisanal Mining Sector” Prof Bonsu said the research revealed an apparent disconnection between norms espoused under the agenda of the SDGs and the tangible implementation of their relevant interventions.
The project was focused at Tarkwa Nsuaem, the biggest mining area in Ghana.
The objective was to explore how involuntary self-employment in Ghana’s ASM exemplifies market-based employment relations that render employees vulnerable to human abuses.
The research, he stressed, revealed a break from the orthodoxy restricted by the normative expectation of traditional organization of work to see an abundance of opportunity created by the adversaries inherent in the difficult work done by artisanal mining workers.
