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| USA: Bush Intervenes in Port Lockout
by Andrea Shalal-Esa, Reuters
October 7th, 2002
President Bush took the first step on Monday toward forcing an end to a lockout at West Coast ports, citing concerns about the fragile U.S. economy, but top Democrats and union officials blasted the move as heavy-handed and demonstrating anti-labor bias. |
| US: Dockworker Lockout Shuts Down West Coast
by George Raine and Carolyn Lochhead, San Francisco Chronicle
October 3rd, 2002
West Coast dockworkers and the shippers who employ them agreed to federal mediation Wednesday, providing a glimmer of hope in the bitter labor lockout that has paralyzed trade at 29 ports from Seattle to San Diego. |
| US: Sweatshop Case Settles for $20M
by Alexei Oreskovic, The Recorder
September 27th, 2002
Three overseas sweatshop lawsuits involving dozens of the United States' largest retailers and a 30,000-member class of garment workers have settled for $20 million. |
| USA: What About Corporate Terrorism?
by David Moberg, Newsday
August 23rd, 2002
Until 1998 Sherri Bufkin happily worked as a manager for Smithfield Foods in Tar Heel, N.C. But in 1997, when workers in the giant meatpacking plant there began to organize a union, her superiors - she has testified - forced her to join their campaign to "do whatever was necessary to keep [the union] out." |
| Burkina Faso: Thousands March Against Privatisation and for Higher Wages
UN Integrated Regional Information Networks
July 18th, 2002
Thousands of workers went on strike on Thursday and marched through the main streets of Burkina Faso's capital, Ouagadougou, to protest against privatisations and to press demands for salary increases. The procession and strike were organised by the country's trade unions. |
| WORLD: New Survey Shows 2001 Grim for Trade Unions
by Jim Lobe, OneWorld US
June 18th, 2002
Labor unions around the world faced a difficult year in 2001 due both to direct and sometimes violent repression, as well as the continuing pursuit by major multinational corporations of cheap labor in poor countries, according to the latest in a series of annual reports by the Brussels-based International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU). |
| Football Dreams Stitched with Children's Hands
Global March Against Child Labour
May 30th, 2002
Child labour and highly unfair labour conditions for adult stitchers in the football industry are still common practices, despite the fact that the contracts between FIFA and sporting goods companies promise the opposite. This was revealed by the Global March Against Child Labour in a presentation of three new reports on China, India and Pakistan. |
| Taiwan: Workers Link Cancer to RCA Plant
by Matthew Yi, San Francisco Chronicle
May 24th, 2002
While many laud the globalization of technology as a positive force that spreads the wealth and helps industry grow, a group of Taiwanese workers came to Silicon Valley Thursday to tell a different story. |
| US: Prisoners Go to Work for Dell
by Drew Cullen, The Register (UK)
May 19th, 2002
Dell rose to the top by cutting more corners than its rivals. The PC giant is cutting another corner by employing prisoners to handle its new consumer recycling scheme in the US. |
| US: Court Says Nike Must Defend its PR
by Harriet Chiang, San Francisco Chronicle
May 3rd, 2002
The California Supreme Court delivered a stiff warning to businesses Thursday, ruling that a San Francisco man can sue Nike Inc. for false advertising for allegedly lying about working conditions at Asian factories where its athletic shoes and clothes are made. |
| US: Mine Workers Chief Arrested at Massey Energy Protest
Environment News Service
March 15th, 2002
United Mine Workers president Cecil Roberts was one of 11 people arrested Thursday at the site of a huge coal sludge spill as they demonstrated against the environmental performance of Massey Energy. |
| US: Gap Admits Strategic Errors After $34m Loss
by Mariko Sanchanta and Lina Saigol, Financial Times
February 27th, 2002
Millard ''Mickey'' Drexler, Gap's chief executive, on Tuesday admitted that the company had ''misread fashion tea leaves'' and violated its own principle of ''keeping things simple'' in making a series of fashion mistakes that led to its reporting a $34m loss. |
| INDONESIA: Running From Reebok's Hypocrisy
by Alexander Cockburn, Los Angeles Times
February 7th, 2002
Right till the end of January, Dita Sari was preparing to fly from her home near Jakarta to Salt Lake City to bask today in the admiration of assorted do-gooders and celebrities mustered by Reebok. The occasion is the 13th annual Human Rights Awards, overseen by a board that includes Jimmy Carter and Kerry Kennedy Cuomo. |
| US: Bush Bans Unions at Justice Department
by Steven Greenhouse, The New York Times
January 16th, 2002
Invoking security concerns, President Bush has issued an executive order barring union representation at United States attorneys' offices and at four other agencies in the Justice Department. |
| TAIWAN: Businesses Said to Run Sweatshops In Central America
by Andrew Perrin, San Francisco Chronicle
August 15th, 2001
This island nation has long been famed for its transformation from a developing country to an industrial colossus. But a recent labor dispute at a Taiwanese-owned textile factory in impoverished Nicaragua has cast a spotlight on what U.S. activists say is Taiwan's least admired export: labor rights abuses. |
| US: Nike Capitalizes on the Anti-Capitalists
by Alicia Rebensdorf, AlterNet
August 7th, 2001
An angry mob gathered around a train station, passing out photocopied flyers and shouting protests against an unjust company. Scrappy stickers were slapped on billboards, directing passers-by to a crudely designed website. The company they were railing against was a frequent target of grassroots activism: Nike. And the group running this guerilla-style anti-advertising campaign? None other than Nike itself. |
| US: Chocolate Firms Fight 'Slave Free' Labels
by Sumana Chatterjee, Philadelphia Inquirer
August 1st, 2001
The proposed legislation is a response to a Knight Ridder Newspapers investigation that found some boys as young as 11 are sold or tricked into slavery to harvest cocoa beans in Ivory Coast, a West African nation that supplies 43 percent of U.S. cocoa. The State Department estimates that as many as 15,000 child slaves work on Ivory Coast's cocoa, cotton and coffee farms. The House of Representatives passed the labeling initiative, 291-115, in late June, and the measure awaits Senate action. |
| Mexico: Prisons Opening Maquiladoras
Associated Press
July 30th, 2001
State officials in Tamaulipas say they want U.S. companies to open workshops inside Mexican prisons to help train prisoners for factory jobs. |
| MEXICO: Economic Downturn Deepens
by Chris Kraul, Los Angeles Times
July 1st, 2001
From farms and automotive plants on the outskirts of Mexico City to the industrial heartland of Monterrey and the wineries and electronics firms in Tijuana and Guadalajara, signs are that this nation's recession is becoming more entrenched. |
| New Study: Mexicans Unable to Live on Sweatshop Wages
Coalition for Justice in the Maquiladoras, Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility, et al.
June 28th, 2001
Workers in foreign-owned export assembly plants in Mexico are not able to meet a family's basic needs on sweatshop wages, according to a comprehensive study conducted in fifteen Mexican cities. |
| IVORY COAST: Slave Labor Taints Sweetness of World's Chocolate
by Sudarsan Raghavan and Sumana Chatterjee, Kansas City Star
June 23rd, 2001
Forty-three percent of the world's cocoa beans, the raw material in chocolate, come from small, scattered farms in this poor west African country. And on some of the farms, the hot, hard work of clearing the fields and harvesting the fruit is done by boys who were sold or tricked into slavery. Most of them are between the ages of 12 and 16. Some are as young as 9. |
| EL SALVADOR: Government Report Details Labor Abuses
by Steven Greenhouse, The New York Times
May 10th, 2001
A long-suppressed report by the Salvadoran government, made public yesterday by an American labor rights group, spelled out serious problems in the country's apparel factories, including unhealthy air and water, large amounts of forced overtime and the frequent dismissal of workers who supported labor unions. |
| US: My Nike Media Adventure
by Jonah Peretti, The Nation
April 9th, 2001
Nike's website allows visitors to create custom shoes bearing a word or slogan -- a service Nike trumpets as being about freedom to choose and freedom to express who you are. Confronted with Nike's celebration of freedom and their statement that if you want it done right, build it yourself, I could not help but think of the people in crowded factories in Asia and South America who actually build Nike shoes. |
| SRI Lanka: Overtime Law Hurts Sweatshop Workers
by Renuka Senanayake, Inter Press Service
March 2nd, 2001
Rights activists are unhappy with the Labour Ministry's plan to amend labour laws to introduce 80 hours of overtime every month for factory workers, including those in export processing zones (EPZ). |
| US: Nike Sued for Greenwash
SocialFunds.com
March 2nd, 2001
Marc Kasky, a self-described environmentalist, viewed the Ernst and Young audit as an opportunity. Enlisting the support of San Francisco attorney Alan Caplan, he filed a suit against Nike in April of 1998. The suit claims that Nike's assertions about the labor conditions in its Asia factories amounted to false advertising. |
| AMERICAN SAMOA: Abuses Cited at Apparel Plant That Supplied U.S. Retailers
by Steven Greenhouse, The New York Times
February 6th, 2001
Workers at a factory in American Samoa that made apparel for the J. C. Penney Company and other retailers were often beaten and were provided food so inadequate that some were ''walking skeletons,'' a Labor Department investigation has found. |
| US: Activist Group Links Pentagon, Firms to Child Labor
Washington Post
December 22nd, 2000
The Defense Department and five companies, including Sharper Image Corp. and Kohl's Corp., sell goods produced at factories in Asia and Central America that exploit workers, a labor rights group claimed. |
| NICARAGUA: Pentagon Contracts Nicaraguan Sweatshops
by Steven Greenhouse, The New York Times
December 3rd, 2000
An arm of the Pentagon has come under fire for procuring large quantities of apparel from a Nicaraguan factory that labor rights groups say is a sweatshop and that the United States trade representative has voiced serious concerns about. |
| US: Amazon.com Fights Union Activity
by Steven Greenhouse, New York Times
November 29th, 2000
Amazon.com has come out swinging in its fight to stop a new unionization drive, telling employees that unions are a greedy, for-profit business and advising managers on ways to detect when a group of workers is trying to back a union. |
| US: Roundup of Student Activism Against Sweatshops
by Keith Meatto, Mother Jones
October 1st, 2000
This year's cause celebre was the campaign to end the use of sweatshop labor by the $2.5-billion collegiate apparel industry. Undergraduates nationwide demanded their colleges quit the Fair Labor Association (FLA) -- an industry-backed watchdog that opponents liken to a fox guarding the hen house -- and join the Worker Rights Consortium. Founded by students, academics, and labor unions last October, the WRC promises strict workplace oversight, free from industry influence. |
| US: Report Says Global Accounting Firm Overlooks Factory Abuses
by Steven Greenhouse, The New York Times
September 28th, 2000
In a rare inside look at the auditing firms that inspect overseas factories to see whether they are sweatshops, an M.I.T. professor contends that the world's largest factory-monitoring firm does a shoddy job and overlooks many safety and wage violations. |
| AUSTRALIA: U.S. Soccer Players Confront Nike Protestors
Times of India
September 12th, 2000
This was Sunday, the day before the start of the three-day World Economic Forum in Melbourne, the same type of meeting that sparked riots in Seattle last year. The two players just happened to pass one of the demonstrations at a park. |
| US: Ford/Firestone = Homicide?
by Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman, Focus on Corporations
September 12th, 2000
Matthew Hendricks is one of more than 150 deaths around the world linked to Firestone tread separations. The families and friends of those killed in these accidents want to know -- what did Ford and Firestone know about these tires and when did they know it? |
| CHINA: McDonald's Fires Underage Workers
Associated Press
September 4th, 2000
Scores of underage workers hired in a mainland China factory that makes toys for McDonald's were fired following recent media reports about the situation, a Hong Kong labor-monitoring group said Monday. |
| US: McDonald's Uses Sweatshop
Associated Press
August 27th, 2000
Snoopy, Winnie the Pooh and Hello Kitty toys sold with McDonald's meals in Hong Kong are made at a mainland Chinese sweatshop that illegally employs child laborers to package the toys, a newspaper reported Sunday. |
| NICARAGUA: US Retailers Contract with Sweatshops
by Carrie Antlfinger, Associated Press
August 22nd, 2000
Gonzalez was one of two workers invited Monday to recount conditions at two Nicaraguan factories that human rights, religious and labor groups claim supply Kohl's Department Stores with cheap garments. |
| EU: Anti-Sweatshop Campaign Targets Adidas
by Peter Dhondt, Inter Press Service
June 9th, 2000
Anti-sweatshop pressure groups are protesting against sporting goods manufacturer, Adidas, being one of the major sponsors of Euro 2000, the European Football Championship that kicks off here Saturday. |
| US: Anti-Sweatshop Student Sit-Ins Continue
UNITE Stop Sweatshop News
March 9th, 2000
As students celebrated anti-sweatshop victories at Wisconsin, Indiana, and other schools, sit-ins began at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and Macalester College in Minneapolis. |
| US: Chicago Sweatshop Plan May Be Model
by Martha Irvine, Associated Press
February 19th, 2000
They sound like stories from another time. But a survey of the working poor in Chicago and surrounding suburbs has found otherwise. More than a third of the 800 workers questioned many of them immigrants described conditions in factories, restaurants and other workplaces that the federal government would deem ''sweatshops.'' |
| US: Activists Resign from University Panel on Sweatshops
by Sharif Durhams, Journal Sentinel
February 2nd, 2000
Student activists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have split with university administrators on how to prevent abuse of workers in factories that make Badger-licensed clothing. The students say Chancellor David Ward is ignoring their concerns. |
| US: University President Now on Flip Side of Protests
by James M. O'Neill, Philadelphia Inquirer
February 1st, 2000
As a student at the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia University in the 1960s, Judith Rodin was caught up in the social activism of the era. Last week, Penn's president found the tables turned as she negotiated with students who spent the entire week staging a sit-in in her outer office. |
| USA: Prisoners Who Speak Out Receive Punishment, Suit Says
by Peter Blumberg, San Francisco Daily Journal
August 23rd, 1999
Two inmates allege in a lawsuit to be filed today that state corrections officials violated their civil rights by punishing them for helping the media expose a prison labor program as an illegal sweatshop, according to their lawyers. |
| Nike Must Stop Exploiting My Students
by Yvonne H.D. Noble, Los Angeles Times
July 26th, 1997
Last fall, a reporter from The Times asked me about the relationship between Crenshaw High School boys' basketball program and Nike in terms of what the corporations donates to the basketball players. To my knowledge as the principal, I told him, the company gave each member of the boys' team a pair of tennis shoes, just as Karl Kani, a smaller African American ownedbusiness, gave shoes to members of the girls' team. |
| Double Standards: Notes for a Border Screenplay
by Debbie Nathan, Texas Observer
June 6th, 1997
The case had been settled only minutes ago, and now jurors for Mendoza v. Contico were seated in a room outfitted with movie theater chairs and plugs for devices like VCRs. They were in the ''Ceremonial Court'' in El Paso, where victorious lawyers often hold post-trial press conferences. |
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