 |
| 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. |
|
|
