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| IRAQ: Sexual Violence: An Occupational Hazard -- In Iraq and at Home
by Marie Tessier, Women's Media Center
December 26th, 2007
Jamie Leigh Jones was just 20 in 2005 when she took a leap of faith to work in Iraq for her employer, military contractor Kellogg, Brown & Root, then a subsidiary of Halliburton. She went on a mission she believed in. Shortly after her arrival in Iraq, however, Jones' ambitions were dashed in an alleged gang rape by co-workers. |
| IVORY COAST: The Bitter Taste of Cocoa in Côte d'Ivoire
by Michael Deibert, IPS News
December 3rd, 2007
In addition to funding conflict, cocoa revenues are believed to have been defrauded for enrichment of persons in both the government and rebel camps. Article also mentions the following corporations: Lev-Ci and Cargill. |
| US: Banana Workers Get $3.3M In Pesticide Case
AP
November 7th, 2007
A Los Angeles jury awarded $3.3 million to six workers on Monday who claimed they were left sterile by a pesticide used at a banana plantation in Nicaragua operated by Dole Fresh Fruit Co. |
| US: Gap plans 'sweatshop free' labels
by Dan McDougall, Guardian
November 4th, 2007
In what would be the biggest commitment to ending child labour ever undertaken by a major retailer, Gap Inc is drawing up plans to label its products 'Sweatshop Free'. |
| US: BP Settlements Seen on Safety and Price Cases
by Stephen Labaton and Lowell Bergman, NY Times
October 24th, 2007
The British energy company BP, tarnished by a string of costly legal problems, is preparing to settle accusations that it was criminally indifferent to worker safety and that it manipulated energy prices. |
| US: Wal-Mart Workers Win $62 Million
by Marieclaire Dale, AP
October 4th, 2007
Wal-Mart workers in Pennsylvania who previously won a $78.5 million class-action award for working off the clock will share an additional $62.3 million in damages, a judge ruled Wednesday. |
| US: UAW Workers Walk Off the Job
by John D. Stoll and Jeffrey McCracken, Wall Street Journal
September 24th, 2007
The decision Monday by the United Auto Workers to walk off the job at General Motors highlights yet again the divisive element of healthcare in labor relations, and how what began as a historic accident is now the single biggest liability for both businesses and workers. |
| CHINA: U.S. Group Accuses Chinese Toy Factories of Labor Abuses
by David Barboza , New York Times
August 21st, 2007
A workers’ rights group in the United States released a report on Tuesday detailing what it called brutal conditions and illegal practices in Chinese toy factories, many of which supply some of the world’s biggest brand-name toy makers, including Walt Disney and Hasbro. |
| WORLD: We must count the true cost of cheap China
by Richard McGregor, Financial Times
August 2nd, 2007
In the wake of the multiple scandals over tainted Chinese food and drug exports in recent months, Chinese goods now have an indelible image of being not just cheap, but life-threatening as well. But the fact that wrongly labelled foods, liquor and pharmaceuticals have routinely sickened and even killed people en masse in China has been largely overlooked. |
| COLOMBIA: Suing Multinationals Over Murder
by Ken Stier, TIME Magazine
August 1st, 2007
Organized labor often complains of its treatment at the hands of corporate America, but its accusations pale in comparison to those made recently by the widows of Colombian mine workers in an Alabama courtroom. During a two-week trial, a Birmingham jury weighed charges that the local Drummond Coal Company bore responsibility for the murders of three union leaders who represented workers at its Colombian mine - the world's largest open pit mine. |
| MEXICO: Thousands of Unpaid Teens Bag Groceries for Wal-Mart
by Joseph Contreras, Newsweek
August 1st, 2007
Wal-Mart prides itself on cutting costs at home and abroad, and its Mexican operations are no exception. Wal-Mart is Mexico's largest private-sector employer in the nation today, with nearly 150,000 local residents on its payroll. An additional 19,000 youngsters between the ages of 14 and 16 work after school in hundreds of Wal-Mart stores, mostly as grocery baggers, throughout Mexico-and none of them receives a red cent in wages or fringe benefits. |
| IRAQ: Foreign Workers Abused at Embassy, Panel Told
by William Branigin, The Washinton Post
July 27th, 2007
Two American civilian contractors who worked on a massive U.S. Embassy construction project in Baghdad told Congress yesterday that foreign laborers were deceptively recruited and trafficked to Iraq to toil at the site, where they experienced physical abuse and substandard working conditions. |
| COLOMBIA: Drummond Union: Govt Muffles Key Witness
by Frank Bajak, Forbes.com
July 24th, 2007
The union activists suing U.S. coal company Drummond Co. Inc. in Alabama in the 2001 murders of three labor leaders say deliberate foot-dragging by Colombian authorities is preventing the jury from hearing their star witness. Concerned by the delay, 12 Democrats in the U.S. Congress wrote Colombia's vice president last week asking him to intercede. |
| US: Tax Break Used by Drug Makers Failed to Add Jobs
by Alex Berenson, The New York Times
July 24th, 2007
Two years ago, when companies received a big tax break to bring home their offshore profits, the president and Congress justified it as a one-time tax amnesty that would create American jobs.
Drug makers were the biggest beneficiaries of the amnesty program, repatriating about $100 billion in foreign profits and paying only minimal taxes. But the companies did not create many jobs in return. Instead, since 2005 the American drug industry has laid off tens of thousands of workers in thi |
| UN: Global Compact with Business 'Lacks Teeth' - NGOs
by Gustavo Capdevila, Inter Press News Service (IPS)
July 6th, 2007
The U.N.'s Global Compact with international big business "at the moment is so voluntary that it really is a happy-go-lucky club," says Ramesh Singh, chief executive of ActionAid, a non-governmental organisation. The controversy has come to a boiling point because of the Global Compact Leaders' Summit being held in Geneva on Thursday and Friday, at which over 1,000 representatives of multinational companies are taking part, in addition to well-known civil society figures like Irene Khan, the secretary general of AI; Mary Robinson, president of the Ethical Globalisation Initiative; Guy Ryder, general secretary of the International Trade Union Confederation; and Jeremy Hobbs, executive director of Oxfam International. |
| CHINA: The Growing Dangers of China Trade
by Jyoti Thottam, TIME Magazine
June 28th, 2007
Growing concerns over the safety of everyday goods manufactured in China and imported to the US have thrown into relief the problematic (and dangerous) differences in safety and regulatory standards between the two countries. |
| SOUTH AFRICA: Globalization Brings South Africa Gains -- and Pains
by David Wessel, The Wall Street Journal
June 21st, 2007
Globalization has been both a boon and a bane for South Africa; it has helped along the country's integration into the global economy and strengthened its regional political position, but it has also contributed to the widening gap between a wealthy minority and the poor majority, something that is creating a whole new generation of disenfranchised citizens. |
| BURMA: No End to Forced Labour
by Gustavo Capdevila , Inter Press Service News Agency
June 15th, 2007
The International Labour Organisation (ILO) expressed profound concern about the persistence of forced labour in Burma, while it is closely monitoring the implementation of a mechanism for victims to file complaints, which was recently agreed with the Southeast Asian country's governing junta. |
| IRAQ: Caught in Trafficking
by David Phinney, Inter Press Service News Agency
June 15th, 2007
A Filipino air conditioner repairman's life was turned upside down when promises of good pay and work in Kuwait were replaced with the harsh realities of corrupt recruiters, horrible living conditions and forced work in Iraq. |
| US: Laid-off Circuit City workers allege age bias in suit
by Molly Selvin and Abigail Goldman, The Los Angeles Times
April 6th, 2007
A lawsuit by three older Circuit City Stores Inc. employees, alleging that the retailer violated California age discrimination laws by laying them off because they were earning too much, is part of a surge in age bias complaints from disgruntled baby boomers. |
| CHINA: In Fear Of Chinese Democracy
by Harold Meyerson, Washington Post
April 4th, 2007
Listen to the apostles of free trade, and you'll learn that once consumer choice comes to authoritarian regimes, democracy is sure to follow. Call it the Starbucks rule: Situate enough Starbucks around Shanghai, and the Communist Party's control will crumble like dunked biscotti. |
| US: Fired Wal-Mart worker claims surveillance ops: report
Reuters UK
April 4th, 2007
The Wal-Mart Stores Inc. worker fired last month for intercepting a reporter's phone calls says he was part of a larger, sophisticated surveillance operation that included snooping not only on employees, but also on critics, stockholders and the consulting firm McKinsey & Co., The Wall Street Journal reported.
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| CHINA: Businesses help China's government abuse rights
by Chang Ching-hsi, Taipai Times
February 9th, 2007
Following the onset of reform in 1978, China has become the world's factory. By late February, its foreign exchange reserves had reached a total of US$853.7 billion, surpassing Japan's US$831.6 billion to become the largest in the world.
Meanwhile, the human rights of the Chinese people remain severely restricted. |
| US: Lawsuit accuses Connecticut nursery of human trafficking
by John Christoffersen, Associated Press
February 8th, 2007
A dozen Guatemalan workers filed a federal lawsuit Thursday accusing one of the nation's largest nurseries of engaging in human trafficking by forcing them to work nearly 80 hours per week, paying them less than minimum wage and denying them medical care for injuries on the job. |
| US: New Scanners for Tracking City Workers
by Sewell Chan, New York Times
January 23rd, 2007
The Bloomberg administration is devoting more than $180 million toward state-of-the-art technology to keep track of when city employees come and go, with one agency requiring its workers to scan their hands each time they enter and leave the workplace. |
| CHINA: Hundreds of workers protest company beatings
Asia News
January 5th, 2007
Hundreds of workers yesterday held a protest in Pingshan (Shenzhen) outside DeCoro, an Italian sofa company, accusing supervisors of severely beating three employees who dared to ask for respect of the minimum wage. In November 2005 disputes had already taken place between the employees and the company with mutual accusations of violence made. |
| SWEDEN: Low Prices, High Social Costs: The Secrets in Ikea's Closet
by Olivier Bailly, Jean-Marc Caudron and Denis Lambert, Le Monde Diplomatic
December 29th, 2006
Despite Ikea's current claims, low prices always incur a high social cost. Between 1994 and 1997 three documentaries screened by German and Swedish television accused the firm of using child labor under degrading conditions in Pakistan, India, Vietnam and the Philippines |
| US: OSHA Cites Tool Maker
Hartford Courant
December 27th, 2006
A West Hartford tool manufacturing plant has been cited for widespread safety and health hazards for the third time in six years by the Hartford office of the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the agency said Tuesday. |
| US: Noose incident sparks bias suit
by Collin Nash, Newsday
December 16th, 2006
A group of African-Americans employed as installers for a Cablevision subcontractor filed a discrimination complaint Friday against their employer and the media giant, alleging intimidation by white managers who the workers say dangled a noose from the rafters. |
| US: Wal-Mart must pay workers $78m
BBC
October 13th, 2006
The world's largest retailer, Wal-Mart, has been ordered to pay at least $78m in compensation to workers who were forced to work during breaks. |
| US: Suit Against Wal-Mart Is Narrowed
Bloomberg News
August 29th, 2006
A federal judge Monday dismissed civil racketeering claims against Wal-Mart Stores Inc., narrowing the scope of a lawsuit that accused the retailer of knowingly employing illegal immigrants to clean its stores. |
| WORLD: Has Coke become the new McDonald's?
by David Teather, The Guardian (UK)
August 18th, 2006
Welcome to the Coke side of life. Africa's planned legal action is just the latest in a litany of alleged human rights and environmental abuses in developing markets that has made Coca-Cola a cause celebre. |
| CHILE: Escondida workers say no progress in talks
by Raphael Minder in Sydney, Rebecca Bream in London and Paul Harris in Santiago, Financial Times
August 9th, 2006
Striking workers at Chile’s Escondida copper mine, the world’s largest, said on Tuesday night that salary talks with the company failed to produce a deal but they would try again on Wednesday to seek a solution to the conflict. |
| US: Widow of Worker Sues Foam Factory
by Jennifer Delson, The Los Angeles Times
July 27th, 2006
The widow of a factory worker alleges in a lawsuit filed in Orange County Superior Court that her 36-year-old husband died from long-term exposure to a deadly chemical at the world's largest manufacturer of surfboard blanks. |
| US: Guilty Plea in Ralphs Labor Case
by Cynthia H. Cho, The Los Angeles Times
July 27th, 2006
Ralphs grocery chain formally pleaded guilty Wednesday to felony charges that it illegally rehired locked-out employees during the 2003-04 supermarket labor dispute in Southern and Central California. |
| US: Widow of Worker Sues Foam Factory
by Jennifer Delson, The Los Angeles Times
July 27th, 2006
The widow of a factory worker alleges in a lawsuit filed in Orange County Superior Court that her 36-year-old husband died from long-term exposure to a deadly chemical at the world's largest manufacturer of surfboard blanks. |
| US: Latino, black workers try for unity
by Darryl Fears , The Washington Post
July 25th, 2006
When she finished eating dinner at the party, Lenora Bruce Bailey sat for a spell on a little wood porch facing Main Street. Two years ago, she had one of the best jobs around, boxing scraps of hog meat at the nearby packing plant. Then she got sick. "They terminated me," she said. "Took away my health insurance." |
| UK: Corporate Manslaughter Crackdown Cheers Unions
by Patrick Wintour, The Guardian
July 20th, 2006
The government will today resolve a long-running internal battle by introducing a corporate manslaughter bill in the Commons, making companies liable for any deaths due to a general breach of the duty of care by the firm. |
| US: Jackson Leads Anti-BP March Near Refinery
The Associated Press
July 5th, 2006
The Rev. Jesse Jackson brought his protest of BP PLC to the site of one of the state's worst refinery accidents Tuesday to speak against what he calls price gouging, discriminatory hiring practices and unsafe working conditions at the company. |
| US: The 100 Worst Corporate Citizens
by Phil Mattera, The Corporate Research Project
July 1st, 2006
For the past 52 years, Fortune magazine has been publishing a list of the largest U.S. corporations, an annual chance for chief executives to brag that "my revenue is bigger than yours." For the past seven years, Business Ethics magazine has issued another kind of ranking -- a list of what it calls the "100 Best Corporate Citizens" -- that promotes virtue over size in the perennial game of corporate comparisons. |
| KATRINA: Needing Builders, Gulf City Looks to China
by Richard Fausset, Los Angeles Times
June 27th, 2006
Frustration over the pace of rebuilding is rampant along the Mississippi Gulf Coast some 10 months after Hurricane Katrina. But in the small city of D'Iberville, leaders are hoping to jump-start construction with an unorthodox solution: importing hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of Chinese laborers to build shopping malls, condominiums and casinos. |
| UK: Wal-Mart Faces Asda Workers' Strike
by Jonathan Birchall and Andrew Taylor, The Financial Times
June 22nd, 2006
Wal-Mart is facing the threat of a potentially damaging strike at Asda, the UK subsidiary that accounts for about 40 per cent of its international sales, in a dispute with one of the country's largest unions over bargaining rights. |
| US: Suit Claims Hospitals Fixed Nurses' Pay
by Steven Greenhouse, The New York Times
June 21st, 2006
Nurses filed class-action lawsuits yesterday against hospitals in Chicago, Memphis, San Antonio and Albany, asserting that the hospitals had violated federal antitrust laws by conspiring to hold down nurses' wages. |
| US: WesternGeco Agrees to $19.6 Million Fraud Fine
by Lynn J. Cook, The Houston Chronicle
June 16th, 2006
A Houston-based subsidiary of Schlumberger, the world's largest oilfield services company, has agreed to pay $19.6 million in penalties for "knowingly submitting fraudulent visa applications" for foreign workers assigned to vessels operating in the Gulf of Mexico, according to a statement from the U.S. Dept. of Justice. |
| US: U.S. Sues Goodyear
The Chicago Tribune
June 15th, 2006
The Labor Department has sued Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co., alleging hiring discrimination against hundreds of women who sought jobs at one of its plants in Virginia in the late 1990s. |
| US: Wal-Mart Likes Chicago, But Not City's Wage Plan
by Gary Washburn, Chicago Tribune
June 13th, 2006
A Wal-Mart official said Monday that his firm could be interested in building "10 or 20" stores on city sites during the next five years, but he added that passage of a minimum wage measure by Chicago's City Council could have a chilling effect on the company's plans. |
| GERMANY: Clash with Unions Looms at VW
by David Gow, Guardian Unlimited (UK)
June 13th, 2006
Volkswagen, Europe's biggest carmaker, is heading for a showdown with its 100,000-strong German workforce after trade unions rejected company proposals to increase the working week to 35 hours without extra pay late on Monday. |
| CONGO: Congo's Child Miner Shame
by Orla Guerin, BBC News
June 12th, 2006
To commemorate World Day Against Child Labour, BBC News has spent a day with child miners in the Democratic Republic of Congo, who work for about one dollar per day. At Ruashi mine, in the Eastern province of Katanga, almost 800 children dig for copper and cobalt. |
| US: Fendi sues Wal-Mart over fake handbags
Reuters
June 11th, 2006
Italian fashion group Fendi S.R.L. sued Wal-Mart Stores in U.S. federal court on Friday, accusing the world's largest retailer of selling counterfeit handbags and passing them off as genuine at its Sam's Club warehouse stores. |
| US: Thrift Faces Labor-Law Suit
Associated Press
June 7th, 2006
Two law firms representing former employees of Washington Mutual Inc. in California, New York and Illinois have sued the Seattle-based thrift, accusing the company of violating labor laws by failing to pay overtime and the federal minimum wage. |
| US: Biggest pension fund boycotts Wal-Mart
by Terry Macalister, The Guardian
June 7th, 2006
Wal-Mart, the world's biggest retailer and owner of the Asda supermarket chain, is being boycotted by the world's largest pension fund for alleged "serious and systematic" abuses of human and employment rights. |
| UK: For England's Army of Migrant Workers, It's Not All Strawberries and Cream
by John Vidal, The Guardian
June 5th, 2006
When Val Salisbury walked down her Herefordshire lane and into a giant plastic polytunnel where dozens of Ukrainians, Lithuanians and other east Europeans were picking strawberries, the workers were surprised. She was, after all, a 69-year-old Englishwoman using a walking frame. But when she started pulling up the plants all around her and throwing them to the ground, they understood why she was there. |
| US: Polo Ralph Lauren Accused of Labor Violations
Bay City News Service
May 30th, 2006
Four former employees of Polo Ralph Lauren filed a lawsuit today in San Francisco Superior Court against the Polo Ralph Lauren Corporation, alleging that the company repeatedly violated the rights of its employees, according to Patrick Kitchin, a lawyer for the plaintiffs. |
| US: Ad Calls for Wal-Mart to Change Principles
Associated Press
May 23rd, 2006
One of Wal-Mart's most vocal union-funded critics took out a full-page ad in The New York Times on Tuesday calling on the company to live up to the ''moral responsibilities'' of being the world's largest private employer by improving wages and health insurance. |
| US: Senate Considers Bill on Mine Safety
by John Holusha, The New York Times
May 16th, 2006
Legislation that would increase the supplies of oxygen available to miners trapped by explosions, rock falls or other disasters, among other measures, was introduced in the Senate today by two senators from both parties. |
| JORDAN: An Ugly Side of Free Trade - Sweatshops
by Steven Greenhouse and Michael Barbaro, The New York Times
May 3rd, 2006
Workers from Bangladesh said they paid $1,000 to $3,000 to work in Jordan, but when they arrived, their passports were confiscated, restricting their ability to leave and tying them to jobs that often pay far less than promised and far less than the country's minimum wage. |
| US: The Case Against Coke
by Michaeil Blanding, The Nation
April 14th, 2006
The Coca-Cola Company will hold its stockholders' meeting, an annual exercise designed to boost the confidence of investors. If the meeting is anything like last year's, however, it may do the opposite. |
| US: AFL-CIO puts big CEO pensions under scope
by Edward Iwata, USA Today
April 7th, 2006
Amid growing concern over a wave of cutbacks in corporate pension plans for employees, the CEOs of top U.S. companies would receive "golden pensions" that range from $2 million to $6.5 million a year, according to a study by the AFL-CIO union federation. |
| ARGENTINA: Bolivian Community Divided Over Sweatshops
by Marcela Valente, Inter Press News Service
April 6th, 2006
The Buenos Aires city government's new offensive against slave labour has resulted in the closure of 30 clandestine textile sweatshops in the Argentine capital. But it has also caused divisions in the Bolivian immigrant community: some denounce the exploitative labour conditions, while others desperately want to keep their jobs, however precarious. |
| PHILIPPINES: Missing, despising Marcopper
by Gerald Gene R. Querubin, Philippine Daily Inquirer
April 6th, 2006
WHEN Marinduque Copper Mining Corp. (Marcopper) stopped its operation in 1997, the municipality of Santa Cruz in Marinduque came to a standstill. Almost 2,500 employees were left jobless, businesses suffered from low sales; some even had to close shop. |
| US: Farmers not lovin' tomato-picking pay
Associated Press
April 1st, 2006
The coalition is urging consumers to pressure Oak Brook, Illinois-based McDonald's Corp. to support a campaign to boost wages for more than 3,000 Florida pickers. They're proposing a penny per pound increase in pay. |
| US: Chromium Evidence Buried, Report Says
by Rick Weiss, The Washington Post
February 24th, 2006
Scientists working for the chromium industry withheld data about the metal's health risks while the industry campaigned to block strict new limits on the cancer-causing chemical, according to a scientific journal report published yesterday. |
| US: Outsourcing Is Climbing Skills Ladder
by Steve Lohr, The New York Times
February 16th, 2006
The globalization of work tends to start from the bottom up. The first jobs to be moved abroad are typically simple assembly tasks, followed by manufacturing, and later, skilled work like computer programming. At the end of this progression is the work done by scientists and engineers in research and development laboratories.
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| US: Pay Fight in Tech's Trenches
by Elissa Silverman, The Washington Post
February 15th, 2006
The situation casts light on the low-tech backbone of a high-tech project -- the casual laborers who are rounded up by subcontractors, sometimes bused across state borders to job sites and set to work digging ditches. Predominantly Hispanic, they work with few guarantees and often no benefits, and they typically are hesitant to come forward with problems, according to lawyers and advocacy groups. |
| US: Sales Brisk for "Wal-Mart" Docu As Accusations Fly
Reuters
February 15th, 2006
Berlin's European Film Market became the backdrop for yet another verbal battle between Wal-Mart and its filmmaker nemesis Robert Greenwald on Tuesday. The Greenwald-directed film "Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price" made for hot sales but heated words at the market. |
| US: For One Clerk, Fight for Wal-Mart Bill Is Personal
by Mary Otto, Washington Post
January 12th, 2006
The debate over the Fair Share Health Care Fund Act, commonly known as the Wal-Mart bill, has dominated politics in the run-up to the General Assembly, with the retailer arguing that Democrats have unfairly singled out one company and union leaders arguing that workers deserve better treatment.
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| US: Fines in mining deaths cut back
by Thomas Frank, USA Today
January 10th, 2006
The nation's coal mines have been required to pay only a fraction of the federal fines imposed after deadly accidents since 1999, a USA TODAY analysis shows. |
| US: Moving Mountains
by Erik Reece, Orion Magazine
January 9th, 2006
It is the people of Appalachia who pay the highest price for the rest of the country's cheap energy—through contaminated water, flooding, cracked foundations and wells, bronchial problems related to breathing coal dust, and roads that have been torn up and turned deadly by speeding coal trucks. |
| US: General Electric workers sue Monsanto over PCBs
by Carey Gillam, Reuters
January 4th, 2006
More than 500 General Electric Co. employees have sued Monsanto Co. along with two related companies, claiming they were exposed to toxic chemicals manufactured for decades by Monsanto, the company said Wednesday. |
| JAPAN: An insider's dark view of Toyota
by Matt Rusling, Christian Science Monitor
January 2nd, 2006
In 1996, Darius Mehri, a wide-eyed young American engineer, went to Japan to work for Toyota's production system. What he found was an abusive environment where the company controlled every movement - inside and outside work - of its employees.
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| ARGENTINA: The War for Gold in Catamarca
by Darío Aranda, Página 12 Newspaper
December 18th, 2005
Water that is undrinkable. Air that is better left unbreathed. A community impoverished, living above mountains of gold. These are some of the contradictions of Andalgalá, a town of 17,000 inhabitants in Catamarca, Argentina, 240 kilometres from the provincial capital, home for ten years now to the largest gold and copper mine in the country, and one of the largest in the world. |
| US: Best Buy Sued for Bias
by Jason Johnson, San Francisco Chronicle
December 10th, 2005
Six current and former employees of Best Buy filed a race- and sex-discrimination lawsuit Thursday against the consumer electronics chain in federal court in San Francisco, accusing it of denying better-paying sales and managerial jobs to African Americans, Latinos and women in favor of white men. |
| LIBERIA: Firestone Sued Over "Slave" Plantation
by Haider Rizvi, OneWorld.net
December 8th, 2005
Firestone, a multinational rubber manufacturing giant known for its automobile tires, has come under fire from human rights and environmental groups for its alleged use of child labor and slave-like working conditions at a plantation in Liberia.
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| US: Immigrants Often Unpaid for Katrina Work
by Justin Pritchard, Associated Press
November 5th, 2005
A pattern is emerging as the cleanup of Mississippi's Gulf Coast morphs into its multibillion-dollar reconstruction: Come payday, untold numbers of Hispanic immigrant laborers are being stiffed. |
| TURKEY: Turkish Coke Bottler Under Fire
by Caroline Wilbert, Atlanta Journal-Constitution
November 3rd, 2005
United Students against Sweatshops held a news conference in Washington on Wednesday, alleging that within the last several months, employees of a Coke bottler in Turkey were fired for joining a union. These workers protested and were allegedly beaten by police at the behest of Coke. |
| WORLD: Social audits 'are failing to detect factory abuses'
by Alison Maitland, The Financial Times
November 2nd, 2005
Social audits of clothing factories in developing countries are failing to detect excessive and forced overtime, abusive treatment of workers and violations of freedom of association, says a report by the Clean Clothes Campaign, a coalition of trade unions and pressure groups, to be published today. |
| AFRICA: The Dark Side of Chocolate
by Kate McMahon, Alternet, Wiretap
October 28th, 2005
The truth behind the chocolate is anything but sweet. On the Ivory Coast of Africa, the origin of nearly half of the world's cocoa, hundreds of thousands of children work or are enslaved on cocoa farms. With poverty running rampant and average cocoa revenues ranging from $30-$108 per household member per year, producers have no choice but to utilize child labor for dangerous farming tasks. Some children, seeking to help their poor families, even end up as slaves on cocoa farms far from home. Slavery drags on and we are paying the slaveholder's wages. |
| US: Desperation Deal at GM
by Robert Kuttner, The Boston Globe
October 22nd, 2005
The United Autoworkers union has agreed to save General Motors over a billion dollars a year in health insurance costs. This is a disguised pay-cut, since workers will now pay more out of pocket for their healthcare. |
| CANADA: Tyson plans to restart striking beef plant
by Ian Cobain and David Leigh, Reuters
October 17th, 2005
Top U.S. meat processor Tyson Foods Inc. said it planned to reopen its massive Canadian plant in Brooks, Alberta on Monday after several tense incidents on a strike picket line last week. |
| US: US Companies Lag in Responsibility, Accountability
by Abid Aslam, OneWorld.net
September 25th, 2005
U.S. companies remain less accountable than European and Asian ones despite recent years' damaging revelations of management chicanery involving finances, labor relations, environmental performance, and consumer protection, a global survey said Friday.
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| US: Wal-Mart Accused of Denying Workers' Rights
by Michael Barbaro, The Washington Post
September 14th, 2005
An American labor rights group filed a class-action lawsuit yesterday against Wal-Mart Stores Inc., alleging that suppliers in five countries violated workers' rights, including denying a minimum wage, requiring overtime and punishing union activity. |
| INDIA: Japanese Investors Learn Indian Labour Laws the Hard Way
by Ranjit Devraj, Inter Press Service
August 3rd, 2005
Japanese investors in India took a few hard lessons in India's tough labour laws when the automobile giant Honda Motors tamely resumed production at its plant outside the national capital this week, ending three months of labour disputes, including pitched battles between police and agitated workers. |
| US: Wal-Mart Is Focal Point Of Democrats' Health Bill
by By Amy Joyce, Washington Post
June 23rd, 2005
Several congressional Democrats introduced a bill that would force states to report the names of companies that have 50 or more employees who receive government-funded health care, an effort to pressure Wal-Mart Stores Inc. in particular to improve employee health coverage. |
| WORLD: Globalization: It's Not Just Wages
by Louis Uchitelle, New York Times
June 17th, 2005
Globalization is often viewed as a rootless process of constantly moving jobs to low-wage countries. But the issue is more complex, as illustrated by Whirlpool's worldwide operations. What attracts Mr. Fettig and other chief executives is a relatively new form of globalization that emphasizes first-rate centers of production and design in various countries - including the United States. |
| WORLD: A Responsible Balancing Act
Financial Times
June 1st, 2005
Public expectations of companies are rising everywhere - but consumers' top concerns vary substantially between countries and regions, according to a new study by GlobeScan, an international opinion research company. |
| FINLAND: Strike Shuts Paper Mills
BBC
May 31st, 2005
Finns are hoarding toilet rolls as a strike in the paper industry - already in its third week - threatens to go on until the end of June. |
| US: BP Admits Workers Were Not Root Cause of Blast
by Anne Belli, Houston Chronicle
May 31st, 2005
Union officials have said they expressed concerns about the location of the trailer as well as BP's use of the vent stack as opposed to a flare system. Had a flare been in place, the excess liquid and vapors likely would have been burned off and the accident may have been prevented. |
| US: Teamsters Picket L.A. Coke Plants
by Nancy Cleeland and Erica Williams, LA Times
May 24th, 2005
Teamster drivers, packers and warehouse workers walked picket lines at all seven Coca- Cola Enterprises Inc. bottling plants in the L.A. area in a dispute over wages and rising health insurance costs. |
| US: New Report on CEO Earnings
by John Burton and Christian Weller, Center for American Progress
May 23rd, 2005
A report form the Center for American Progress details how Corporate CEOs have enjoyed record levels of compensation and corporations have seen record profits, as more and more middle-class Americans are experiencing stagnant wages and vanishing benefits. |
| US: Teflon Target
by Chris Serres, Star Tribune
May 22nd, 2005
For years, Target has cultivated an image of itself as the "anti-Wal-Mart," a retailer that refuses to sacrifice workplace standards in the pursuit of higher sales and stock prices. But now, after a decade of meteoric growth at both Target and Wal-Mart, labor groups say the two retailers are no longer very different in the way they treat their workers.
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| US: Cleaning Up The Laundry Industry
by Mary Beth Maxwell, TomPaine.com
May 17th, 2005
Earlier this month, hundreds of hospitals and the patients they serve came close to working without clean linens. A strike was threatened and postponed but still looms because of ongoing contract negotiations and labor disputes between the nation’s largest hospital laundry supplier, Angelica Textile Services, and its employees |
| CHINA: Corporate Social Responsibility
China View
May 13th, 2005
Today, China is probably more integrated into the international community than at any point in its history, and the competitive economic landscape is changing rapidly. For multinational companies that take social and environmental responsibilities seriously, unprecedented opportunities abound for them to turn the corporate social responsibility (CSR) fad into a real opportunity for social change. |
| US: Memphis '68, Revisited
by Si Kahn, AlterNet
May 6th, 2005
With help from some unlikely places, Corrections Corporation of America is hoping to build the largest for-profit private prison in the United States. |
| CANADA: Closure of First Unionized Wal-Mart Sends Signal
by Paul Weinberg, IPS
May 1st, 2005
Wal-Mart, the world's largest retailer, may be violating international and Canadian laws by using covert strategies to undermine a unionising drive at its Canadian stores, say labour experts and union activists.
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| MALAYSIA: Workers to March Against Privatization
by Anil Netto, IPS
April 29th, 2005
Malaysia's workers will mark International Labor Day on May 1 with a strong protest against globalisation, which they feel is gradually eroding away their rights and making poor Malaysians poorer. |
| EL SALVADOR: Fraying of the Textile Industry
by Ginger Thompson, New York Times
March 25th, 2005
Employment in El Salvador's garment industry declined in 2004 for the first time in a decade. Thousands more jobs will be lost this year, threatening to drive up El Salvador's largest export to the United States: its people. |
| US: Taco Bell, farm workers reach agreement
by Brett Barrouguere, Associated Press
March 8th, 2005
Taco Bell will pay an extra penny for each pound of tomatoes it buys under an agreement with a group of farm workers that had been protesting the fast food chain for three years. |
| CAMBODIA: Police Open Fire to End Factory Protest
by Ek Madra, Reuters
February 22nd, 2005
Cambodian riot police fired assault rifles and used electric batons on Tuesday to break up a protest by 1,300 workers demanding redundancy payment from a garment factory that shut down in January. |
| WORLD: The Rise of the Micro-Multinationals
by By Jim Hopkins, USA Today
February 11th, 2005
Nearly 40% of start-ups in a new USA TODAY study employ engineers, marketers, analysts and others in jobs created in India and other nations. The study found that many U.S. start-ups, speeding the pace of globalization, now bypass the USA for nations where customers and cheap labor are plentiful. |
| US: Towns Hand Out Tax Breaks, Then Cry Foul as Jobs Leave
by Timothy Egan, New York Times
October 20th, 2004
After a decade of tax breaks and union concessions to keep the company in a place that has been making refrigerators for more than 50 years, Maytag closed its factory last month, terminating 1,600 jobs. Maytag may be done with Galesburg, but Galesburg is not done with Maytag. |
| NIGERIA: Fuel Price Strike Suspended
by Staff Writers, afrol News
October 14th, 2004
Nigeria's trade union now gives the government two weeks to reduce fuel prices while temporarily calling off the nation-wide strike. Negotiations between trade union leaders and the federal government started today, after trade unions during four days have demonstrated their power to cause an almost complete stand-still throughout the country. |
| AUSTRALIA: Unions Take Hardie Asbestos Protest to U.S.
by Barbara Adam, Bloomberg
September 15th, 2004
Australian labor unions will take their protest over James Hardie Industries NV's funding shortfall for asbestos victims to the U.S. today, seeking to extend their boycott of the company's building products to its largest market. |
| US: Implored to 'Offshore' More
by Paul Blustein, Washington Post
July 2nd, 2004
A report by an influential consulting firm is exhorting U.S. companies to speed up "offshoring" operations to China and India, including high-powered functions such as research and development. |
| IRAQ: Many Foreign Laborers Receive Inferior Pay, Food and Shelter
by Ariana Eunjung Cha, The Washington Post
July 1st, 2004
The war in Iraq has been a windfall for Kellogg Brown & Root Inc., the company that has a multibillion-dollar contract to provide support services for U.S. troops. Its profits have come thanks to the hard work of people like Dharmapalan Ajayakumar, who until last month served as a kitchen helper at a military base. |
| US: Union Plans Four-Day Strike Against SBC
Associated Press
May 19th, 2004
The union representing 102,000 employees of SBC Communications Inc. said Wednesday it would stage a four-day strike starting Friday because of a deadlock in contract negotiations with the nation's second biggest local phone company. |
| US: Probe into Iraq trafficking claims
by Elise Labott, CNN
May 5th, 2004
The United States is investigating reports Indian nationals were victims of human trafficking to Iraq and mistreated while working there as contractors in U.S. military camps, the State Department has said. |
| WORLD: Shell Outsourcing
by Mark Tran, Guardian (London)
April 28th, 2004
Royal Dutch Shell, the embattled oil giant, said today it will cut up to 2,800 jobs as it relocates its global technology division. IT operations, now concentrated in the UK, the Netherlands and the US, are to be shifted to India or Malaysia, where Shell already employs about 1,000 people in a technology support centre. |
| LAUSD Adopts Anti-Sweatshop Code
Los Angeles Times
March 25th, 2004
The Los Angeles Unified School District has adopted one of the nation's most sweeping anti-sweatshop measures, requiring suppliers of everything from desks to scissors to disclose where and how those products were made and guarantee that workers making them earn a "non-poverty" wage. |
| Yo No Quiero Taco Bell: Farmworker Struggles and the Legacy of C�sar Chavez
by Catherine Cunningham and Sean Sellers, CommonDreams.org
March 21st, 2004
In Immokalee, Florida, the situation is dire. South Florida is the nation's leading producer of fresh tomatoes. Taco Bell is a major purchaser of Florida tomatoes. Their enormous purchasing power gives them a unique opportunity to intervene on behalf of farm workers who subsidize corporate profits with sweatshop tomatoes. |
| China: Workers Demand Wages, Security
by Eva Cheng, Green Left Weekly
March 3rd, 2004
Some 2000 workers and their retired counterparts from the Tieshu textile factory in Suizhou, Hubei province, staged an angry protest on February 8 denouncing the now-defunct plants management for cheating workers of savings and benefits. They also accuse management of corruption. |
| Farmworkers March for Living Wage
Food First
February 26th, 2004
Food First Joins the 2004 Taco Bell Truth Tour: March, Organized by the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, Demands Humane Working Conditions for Farmworkers |
| US: Remaking America in Wal-Mart's Image
The Black Commentator
February 19th, 2004
The only competition that exists among the corporate players at the commanding heights of the American economy is the race to determine who can squeeze the workers first and hardest. The Safeway, Kroger and Albertsons chains and their subsidiaries claim underdog status, as they grind $10 an hour workers into the dirt. The real problem the traditional grocery chains face is weak demand and an inability to raise prices in a deflationary environment not Wal-Mart pricing pressure. They eagerly follow Wal-Mart's model that there is no limit to how far they are willing to reduce labor costs. If there is a bottom, Wal-Mart will find it first, and the pack will eagerly follow. |
| IRAQ: Life More Difficult Now?
by Pratap Chatterjee and Herbert Docena, Southern Exposure
February 4th, 2004
Bechtel's projects are examined by freelance journalists. Locals complain of shoddy work, problems with schools, sewage, electricity, gas lines, and low wages. |
| India: The Dark Side of the Outsourcing Revolution
by Naeem Mohaiemen, AlterNet
January 25th, 2004
India is at the red-hot center of the Outsourcing Revolution. Thirty percent of all new Information Technology (IT) work for U.S. companies is now done abroad, mostly in India. Analysts forecast that by 2008 Indian IT services and back-office support will grow to a $57 billion a year industry with four million workers. |
| US: Nike on Trial
by Jim Hightower, Alternet
July 22nd, 2003
The world's largest maker of athletic shoes and clothing swooshed into the U.S. Supreme Court last year arrogantly asserting a corporate right to lie. At issue is a 1998 case brought by a lone consumer activist named Marc Kasky. He claimed in California state courts that Nike had engaged in false advertising when it launched a PR campaign to fight off the charges that it was a global abuser of sweatshop labor. |
| US: Up Against Wal-Mart
by Karen Olsson, Mother Jones Magazine
April 28th, 2003
At the world's largest and most profitable retailer, low wages, unpaid overtime, and union busting are a way of life. Now Wal-Mart workers are fighting back. |
| US: Bush Top Gun vs. S.F. Activist
by Zachary Coile, San Francisco Chronicle
April 24th, 2003
WASHINGTON -- The Bush administration's top Supreme Court lawyer urged the high court Wednesday to toss out a San Francisco consumer activist's suit against Nike Inc. because it could discourage corporations from defending themselves in public against their critics. |
| IRAQ: For Bangladeshis, War's End Means Return to Jobs
by Qurratul Ain Tahmina, Inter Press Service
April 8th, 2003
Ninety percent of the yearly average of documented 200,000 migrant workers from mainly Muslim Bangladesh is placed in Middle Eastern countries. Remittance from migrant workers in the Middle East comes to about one-fifth of Bangladesh's yearly import payments. Last year Bangladesh got $2.5 billion in remittances, 75 percent of it from workers in the Middle East. |
| US: Family Farm Organizations Endorse Taco Bell boycott
Coalition of Imokalee Workers
March 19th, 2003
In what is a natural -- but all too rare -- partnership, farmworkers and family farmers have joined forces in the battle against the corporate domination and consolidation of agriculture, as several family farm organizations have endorsed the Taco Bell boycott! |
| BRAZIL: Weakened Trade Unions Look to Lula for Help
by Mario Osava, Inter Press Service
March 12th, 2003
Trade unions proliferated in Brazil from 1991 to 2001, but their power did not keep in step, says a report that is fuelling debate now that the nation's president is a man was a unionist himself, former metalworker Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva. |
| USA: Levis is Lone Hold Out in Saipan Suit
by Victor Narro, Sweatshop Watch
March 3rd, 2003
This month, an important event is taking place that should change the lives of workers on Saipan, an island in the U.S. Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, and impact the way we address issues of sweatshop throughout the world. |
| MEXICO: Toll of Murdered Young Women Tops 300
by Diego Cevallos, IPS
February 20th, 2003
Three more young women were added this week to the list of over 300 like them who since 1993 have been murdered and mutilated in the border city of Ciudad Juarez. |
| EL SALVADOR: World Trade Body Ignores Union Appeals Over Treatment of Workers
by Marty Logan, OneWorld US
February 6th, 2003
The World Trade Organization praised El Salvador Wednesday for taking steps to open up its economy, but ignored a damning report from a global grouping of trade unions that accuses the country of dismissing workers' rights, particularly in export processing zones (EPZs), known locally as 'maquilas.' |
| US: Shooting the Messinger -- Report on Layoffs Killed
by David Lazarus, San Francisco Chronicle
January 3rd, 2003
The Bush administration, under fire for its handling of the economy, has quietly killed off a Labor Department program that tracked mass layoffs by U.S. companies. |
| WORLD: Labor Dispute at the WTO
by Andrew Casey, Labour News Network
November 21st, 2002
Staff employed by the World Trade Organisation have begun an industrial campaign against their bosses over a salary dispute. WTO staff met last week and unanimously decided that the Staff Council should formulate a strong action plan which would steadily escalate. |
| ARGENTINA: Workers Take Factories into Their Own Hands
by Pablo Waisberg, Latin America Press
November 21st, 2002
Last December, overwhelmed by debt and the countrys economic chaos, the Brukman brothers left their high-end suit factory in Buenos Aires and never returned. They also left more than 100 employees awaiting back pay. |
| BRAZIL: Debt Takes Precedence Over War on Child Labor
by Ricardo de Bittencourt, InterPress Service
November 20th, 2002
Child labor has not yet been eradicated in Brazil due to cutbacks in social spending aimed at ensuring payments on the foreign debt, Social Watch, an international network linking non-governmental organisations from 60 countries, said Wednesday. |
| WORLD: Law to Protect Migrant Workers Short One Vote
by Thalif Deen, Inter Press Service
October 22nd, 2002
A United Nations convention aimed at protecting the rights of migrant workers worldwide needs to be ratified by only one more country before it becomes international law. |
| 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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