The Solidarity Center’s online presence has been stripped to its bare bones.
Instead of a website brimming with resources involving the Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit’s extensive work in labor and democratic rights in more than 70 countries, a single page remains to reiterate a mission that is now under threat from the Trump administration’s gutting of foreign aid funds in the name of saving taxpayer money.
“In too many places, workers stand alone—fighting for fair wages, safe workplaces and basic dignity. We make sure they don’t have to,” it reads. “We don’t just support worker rights—we help workers turn those rights into reality. We provide the training, resources and legal support workers need to push for fair pay, demand safe working conditions and ensure they are treated with respect.”
The Solidarity Center was founded in 1997 by the AFL-CIO, the largest federation of labor unions in the United States, as the American Center for International Labor Solidarity. Funded primarily through grants from organizations such as the National Endowment for Democracy, or NED, and the U.S. Agency for International Development, better known as USAID, the Solidarity Center has become the largest U.S.-based international worker rights organization that partners directly with workers and their unions.
It has buttressed the work of grassroots organizations to help workers resolve legal disputes and other workplace grievances in Bangladesh, underwritten research about climate-change-stoked heat stress in Cambodia, won millions of dollars in owed severance for lingerie makers in Thailand, fought Covid-era exploitation alongside maquiladora unions in Honduras, improved workplace safety for tens of thousands of women in Kyrgyzstan and broke ground in addressing gender-based violence and harassment in denim factories in Lesotho.
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The full version of its website has been suspended to save costs, said the organization, which declined an interview, adding that it hoped a restoration would be on the horizon.
But its hopes of doing so are growing dimmer with each passing swing of the scythe by billionaire Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency, which has sought to drastically cut down the federal workforce, even moving to dismantle entire agencies. Among them is USAID, which was ordered to fire thousands of employees, halt the disbursement of foreign aid funds and kill contracts, despite federal judges, including one on Tuesday, ruling that doing so was unlawful and likely unconstitutional. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, named in February as the agency’s acting administrator, plans to move what remains of USAID under the State Department. Last week, Rubio said that 83 percent of the six-decade-old organization’s programs have been terminated. In a post on X, which is owned by Musk, he thanked DOGE and “our hardworking staff who worked very long hours to achieve this overdue and historic reform” in foreign aid.
Then there has been NED, a quasi-autonomous grant-making organization that filed a lawsuit against executive branch agencies and officials in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia earlier this month for what it described as the unlawful withholding of congressionally appropriated funding, kneecapping its efforts to “encourage free and democratic institutions throughout the world through private sector initiatives.” NED cited the Solidarity Center as one of its core institutes, alongside the National Democratic Institute, the International Republican Institute and the Center for International Private Enterprise. Together, they receive one-third of its total appropriation, which includes $167 million already obligated by the State Department but was being withheld and another $72 million that NED said the government is “refusing to obligate.”
“NED is a venture capital fund for democracy, with 83 percent of its resources going directly to support people fighting for freedom of speech, thought and religion,” NED board chair Peter Roskam, said in a statement. “The sudden withholding of our funds endangers that mission and cripples a force multiplier for America’s national interest. American security, prosperity and global leadership benefit when the world is freer and more prosperous.”
An ‘existential threat’
In an affidavit included by NED in its lawsuit, Shawna Bader-Blau, executive director at the Solidarity Center estimated that 52 percent of its expenditures for the 2025 fiscal year, amounting to roughly $39.5 million, would come from NED in monthly payments of $3.3 million or so. So far, it has received nearly $5.3 million. At the time the lawsuit was filed, the organization had received no additional payments from NED since Feb. 4.
“The NED funding freeze is an existential threat to the Solidarity Center’s mission, its partners and the workers we serve,” Bader-Blau said. “Without immediate intervention, our progress in building strong, independent labor movements that support democracy and economic justice will be undone. As a result of the freeze, the very existence of the SC and some of its partners is uncertain and at grave risk.”
The broader impact of the funding stoppage is best described in the numbers she provided. Since the NED funding freeze, the Solidarity Center has laid off or furloughed 64 employees, or almost 60 percent of its headquarters staff, in Washington, D.C. Across its field offices in more than two dozen countries, it has laid off 118 employees (42 percent) and furloughed 47 (17 percent). If access to NED funding is not restored by April, Bader-Blau said, the Solidarity Center will be forced to halve its remaining global workforce. It will also have to close 17 of the 26 offices that remained open in February after restructuring and earlier funding cuts reduced their numbers from 32 in 2024. This will eliminate 65 percent of its on-the-ground presence and risk the loss of legal registration in several countries that, once lapsed, may never be regained.
“The SC will stand to lose the vast majority of its talent pool, institutional memory and the experiences that its staff has learned and acquired through their years of experience,” she said. “In HQ and field offices, staff include organizers, specialists in the field of labor rights and standards, human rights and democracy activists and labor lawyers. Many of our staff come to the Solidarity Center with experience working for labor unions in the countries where we work, or as community leaders with histories of activism pursuing justice and democracy in local or national movements. These positions require extensive knowledge of and expertise in union building—organizing, collective bargaining, mobilizing workers and advocacy. As a result of the loss of NED funds, the SC has laid off these uniquely qualified staff.”
Jon Jacoby, CEO of GoodWeave International, a nonprofit that combats child labor in global supply chains using what it says is a “market-based system and holistic approach,” considers the Solidarity Center a neighbor, both physically in Washington, D.C., and in terms of a shared approach to enabling rights such as freedom of association and collective bargaining to foster workplace dignity.
“It’s just a tragedy if they can no longer operate anywhere near the scale that they have been,” he said. “Losing the Solidarity Center’s reach is a setback for the whole field. Not just, of course, in clothing and carpets, where we work, but in so many other sectors we aim to advance worker rights together: agriculture, mining, domestic workers, and so on. They do a lot of really important work as connective tissue between movements for labor rights, inclusive economies and democratic societies.”
Since the legal filing, NED has been able to claw back access to its iced funding, which it referred to as a “partial restoration,” that will help it “begin stabilizing operations and resume grantmaking.”
But the Solidarity Center is still in a precarious position. NED’s uncertain funding future notwithstanding, the nonprofit isn’t, as far as one source familiar with the situation knows, one of the 17 percent of USAID programs that have survived DOGE’s onslaught. Any loss of funds or interruption to its programs entails breaking what Bader-Blau described in her affidavit as its longstanding commitments of support to regional partners, which they would take as an indication that the Solidarity Center “will not be a reliable partner in the future.” So far, she said, 45 active sub-award agreements totaling $2.3 million with local partners have been paused, hamstringing the ability of partner unions and worker rights organizations that rely on these resources.
“As governments and corporate actors exploit this vacuum, authoritarian regimes and the unscrupulous employers that collude with them to undermine rights are emboldened, worker exploitation increases, and the fragile link between labor rights and democratic stability erodes,” Bader-Blau said. “This reputational damage is not easily repaired; even if funding is restored, the credibility lost, relationships severed and institutional knowledge forfeited will have long-term, possibly irreversible, consequences—jeopardizing the very future of the Solidarity Center and its mission to uphold democracy, economic justice and human rights globally.”
Downstream impacts
The ripple effects are already being felt in Bangladesh, the world’s second-largest exporter of clothing after China. The Solidarity Center’s Bangladesh program leans heavily on USAID’s funding, with a small percentage coming from the Department of Labor and NED. The cuts would decimate the organization’s work amid a fraught social and political transition for the South Asian nation, where unions represent only 5 percent of its workers and fundamental rights such as freedom of association and collective bargaining are hardly a given.
Sitting at an otherwise empty meeting room at the Morrow Hotel in Washington, D.C., where the Fair Labor Association held its 2025 board meeting last week, Nazma Akter, founder and executive director of the Awaj Foundation, a grassroots group that uses money from the Solidarity Center to support 60,000 garment workers in Dhaka and Chittagong, told a reporter to “write a good story.” It took just one executive order to wipe out 25-30 percent of Akter’s funding, forcing her to lay off 30 of her 150 employees and shutter four offices.
One of her project coordinators was still on maternity leave when Akter had to give her the bad news, resulting in tears from both sides. Another of the axed staffers is a widow with two children to raise. There was no notice, Akter said, and no way to prepare. As she grew increasingly agitated, her body seemed to vibrate with anger for the workers who are losing valuable services—not just relating to industrial relations but also reproductive health, domestic violence and migrant rights. Former prime minister Sheik Hasina’s iron-fisted rule has nearly bankrupted the country, with the central bank all but on life support. The economic damage has been undeterminable but also incalculable.
“Where else can they get justice?” Akter asked. “This will make us weaker. The power isn’t distributed equally. America gets the profits and the benefits, and we suffer.”
Jacoby, who has seen firsthand the transformative effect that respect for the fundamental rights of workers to organize, assemble and bargain collectively has on preventing child and forced labor, can only agree.
“On the grassroots level, the country level, and the global level, losing any portion of the Solidarity Center’s reach and impact due to these devastating cuts in U.S. foreign aid would be a setback for popular movements countering authoritarianism and advancing inclusive economies and open societies,” he said. “If the Solidarity Center is indeed forced to reduce its country staff dramatically in Bangladesh, positive, durable outcomes will shrink for Bangladeshi as well as American workers and businesses.”
The fact that Europe is also tightening its foreign aid belt isn’t helping. It was only last week that British prime minister Keir Starmer said he would be whittling the foreign aid budget from 0.5 percent of the United Kingdom’s gross national income to 0.3 percent in 2027 to shore up defense spending, leading the international development minister to resign in protest. France is contracting aid budget by 35 percent and will launch a review of its existing programs. Facing what it says are mounting costs due to the remaining fallout from the Covid-19 pandemic, the war in Ukraine and the global energy crisis, Switzerland plans to jettison its development initiatives in Albania, Bangladesh and Zambia by the close of 2028. Akter herself received word from a Dutch organization that it won’t be renewing the Awaj Foundation’s grant when it expires later this year.
For the Solidarity Center and the downstream organizations that depend on its largesse, that means there are few good alternatives for filling a funding gap made all the larger by the retreat in governmental involvement, and authority and accountability that brings with it.
“It’s such a fundamental organization that constributing to great research. And I benefited from some of that,” said Mark Anner, dean and distinguished professor at the Rutgers School of Management and Labor Relations. “By cutting their funding, it’s just another way of abandoning the workers who have given the U.S. so much through their labor. These are people that have been providing the clothing we wear for decades.”
Anner predicts that the squeeze on wages and working conditions will only increase as a result, which, in turn, could exacerbate workplace violence and harassment because “they’re linked to productivity goals, just getting workers to work faster.” He added: “This is going to have very unfortunate impacts on workers.”
What solidarity means
Kalpona Akter, executive director at the Bangladesh Center for Worker Solidarity, admitted she’s struggling due to the USAID cuts that accounted for a “good chunk” of her nonprofit’s funding. BCWS also received money from the Solidarity Center, which she credits with transforming her from a child garment worker to a union leader. It was at one of the organization’s labor rights training sessions that 12-year-old Akter, realized that she and her co-workers had power—and that they deserved better.
“Since then, through every strike, every contract fight and every arrest, the Solidarity Center has been there—offering support, expertise and solidarity,” she said. “Without them, workers like me wouldn’t just be unheard; we’d be invisible.”
Akter said she won’t stop organizing, but that the Trump administration’s crackdown will push back on her work and slow it down. Most of all, she mourns the loss of support from the United States as an ally that only in November affirmed its belief in “independent, democratic trade unions for Bangladeshi workers and the businesses that employ them.” One of the organizations in the American delegation to Dhaka was the Department of Labor’s Bureau of International Labor Affairs, or ILAB. It, too, could be sacked by DOGE, a possibility that prompted the American Apparel & Footwear Association and the Fair Labor Association to urge newly sworn-in Secretary of Labor Lori Chavez-DeRemer to “fully preserve and promote ILAB and its programs to defend workers.”
Scott Nova, executive director of the Worker Rights Consortium, a labor watchdog group that is also based in Washington, D.C., described the Solidarity Center as a lifeline, without which the fight for worker rights would be silenced, corporations would operate with impunity and exploitation would win.
“How does a single worker stand up to a plant manager, a global brand or even an entire government? The answer is simple: they don’t do it alone,” he said. “The power imbalance is staggering, but together, we can change the equation. The Solidarity Center helps level the playing field, using collective power to equip workers to win changes that benefit everyone. It is the hub to the wheel that makes this movement work. The fight for fair wages and safe conditions in global supply chains would be impossible without the Solidarity Center. No other organization works at this scale, with this reach, in direct partnership with independent worker movements.”
Writing on LinkedIn last week, Bader-Blau said that the Solidarity Center has been in the “fight of our lives” since January, when it began laying off employees, scuppering critical programs and pulling “desperately needed support” from workers in “some of the toughest, most dangerous conditions in the world.” But it’s a fight that matters more than ever, she said.
“If there’s one thing I know, it’s that working people—we the labor movement—don’t back down. Through this crisis, I’ve been reminded—again and again—of what solidarity really means. It’s not just a word. It’s everything,” Bader-Blau wrote. “For decades, together, we have built something powerful: a global movement where workers have a voice, unions can organize freely and labor rights strengthen democracy. That work is under threat—but we are still here. One day longer, one day stronger. Solidarity is more than our name. It’s our purpose. It’s our power. And it will carry us through.”