Stopping Gender-Based Violence and Harassment at Work

Women across the world experience gender-based violence and harassment in the workplace. In the context of globalization and neoliberalism, work plays an important role in constructing and maintaining the economic, social and cultural systems of oppression that women face. Women in insecure, precarious employment and women not protected by trade unions are the most at risk of violence and as the #MeToo movement has shown, it stretches across societies rich and poor.

In June 2019, the International Labour Organization adopted a ground-breaking global Treaty on eliminating violence and harassment in the world of work. This historic vote was the result of more than a decade of campaigning and lobbying by women trade union leaders and their allies across the world. Chidi King, Robin Runge and Jane Pillinger played a key role in the campaign and the negotiation of the Convention. Combining both their activist and academic backgrounds, this book documents their unique insights into and experience of the campaign and its landmark achievement in international labour law, global policy and the cross-movement building of workers’ and women’s rights, which has reignited the role of trade unions, and particularly women in trade unions, in global advocacy.

Jane Pillinger is an independent researcher and a former visiting professor in gender studies at the London School of Economics and a senior research fellow in the Department of Social Policy and Criminology at the Open University.


Robin R. Runge is co-director of the Equality and Inclusion Department at the Solidarity Center, Washington, DC, and Professorial Lecturer in Law at the George Washington University Law School.


Chidi King is the former director of the Equality Department at the International Trade Union Confederation.