About the Report

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In December 2012, the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) Bureau of International Labor Affairs (ILAB) awarded a $1.5 million grant to Colombia’s Escuela Nacional Sindical (ENS) to implement the project Strengthening Protections of Internationally Recognized Labor Rights in Colombia (Workers’ Rights Centers) over three years. In 2015, ENS received a one-year extension with an additional $600,000 in funding for a total of $2.1 million.

The project focuses on increasing the awareness of workers’ rights and sustaining the Colombian government’s efforts to strengthen labor rights. As part of the United States–Colombia Trade Promotion Agreement (TPA), which went into effect on May 15, 2012, the Colombian government agreed to develop and implement an Action Plan Related to Labor Rights as a precondition for the TPA to take effect. Under the Action Plan, the Colombian government committed to take specific steps to bring Colombian labor laws and practices into greater conformity with internationally recognized labor rights.

ENS believes that the best way to realize the full potential of reforms initiated by the Colombian government is to engage workers and assist them in presenting well-supported claims of workers’ rights violations (WRVs) to the proper administrative or legal authorities. To engage and assist workers, ENS established three Centros de Atención Laboral (CALs) [Workers’ Rights Centers], in Bogotá, Cartagena, and Bucaramanga, and expanded an established CAL in Medellín. Law student interns and volunteers at the CALs provide free legal assistance services to workers to facilitate the effective protection of their rights. These activities are designed to achieve the project’s two main outcomes:

• Outcome 1: Workers, with the assistance of the CALs, will improve their knowledge of and ability to defend their labor rights.
• Outcome 2: Workers will make more frequent and more effective use of the administrative and legal mechanisms to protect their labor rights.

To produce empirical evidence about the effectiveness of the project, ILAB (with funding from the DOL Chief Evaluation Office (CEO)) commissioned IMPAQ International to conduct rigorous implementation and impact evaluations. The midterm and end-of-project implementation reports provide an assessment of ENS’s progress toward achieving its objectives, identify lessons learned from the program strategy, provide feedback to ENS with regard to its achievements, and make recommendations to ENS and ILAB for future consideration of similar projects. The report describes the end-of-project impact evaluation results.

Research Questions

• Does the CAL affect the probability that a worker will file a legal claim about a current WRV or address it directly with the employer?
• Does the CAL affect the distribution and outcomes of legal claims and direct negotiations with the employers?
• Do CAL services change workers’ knowledge of their labor rights and their knowledge about the mechanisms to initiate/file labor-related complaints?
• Do workers living in a region where a new CAL has opened, compared with workers living in a region with no CAL, experience a change in the following: 1) workers’ awareness of CAL services in WRV cases and their knowledge about labor rights in general, 2) workers’ probability of filing a legal claim using CAL services or addressing the WRV directly with the employer, workers’ outcomes, once they have filed a legal claim or started direct negotiation with the employer, and workers’ likelihood of not filing a legal claim when experiencing a WRV?

Key Takeaways

• CALs seem to have had positive effects on workers using the services of the established offices in Bogotá and Medellín for the first time.
• The impact of the opening a new Bucaramanga CAL on palm oil workers (one of priority sectors of the project) in specific municipalities located near the CALs and on workers’ knowledge and take-up rate of CAL services indicate some positive effects. Specifically, after the Bucaramanga CAL opened its doors, workers became more aware of the services CALs provided and more likely to use them when filing a legal claim.

Citation

Borelli, S., Zapata, D., Paredes, M. (2016). IMPAQ International. Bureau of International Labor Affairs (ILAB) Department of Labor (USDOL) & USDOL Chief Evaluation Office Independent Impact Evaluation for the Strengthening Protections of Internationally Recognized Labor Rights in Colombia Project. Chief Evaluation Office, U.S. Department of Labor.

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The Department of Labor’s (DOL) Chief Evaluation Office (CEO) sponsors independent evaluations and research, primarily conducted by external, third-party contractors in accordance with the Department of Labor Evaluation Policy and CEO’s research development process.