Chemicals & Manufacturing

Rodney Bridgett was killed when a piece of Tyson Foods' heavy equipment crushed him at the company's beef processing plant in Sioux City, Iowa. In a new CorpWatch investigation into federal contractors who win millions in government business despite violating workers rights, Chris Thompson tells his story. Read More

Firestone, a U.S. tire company, paid out millions of dollars to Charles Taylor, a Liberian warlord in the 1990s, despite knowing about his brutal human rights record, according to documents uncovered by ProPublica, an investigative journalism website. Taylor is now serving a 50 year prison sentence for war crimes. Read More

A clash between Belaruskali and Uralkali - the global potash exporters from Belarus and Russia respectively - almost destroyed a global cartel that has artificially kept prices of fertilizer as high as $400 a ton in international markets. Read More

ArcelorMittal, the global steel giant, has been ordered to hand over documents about the environmental impact of two South African facilities to community activists. The Luxembourg-based company, the largest steel producer in Africa, has been accused of polluting the air and water as well as dumping hazardous waste. Read More

Taiwanese company AU Optronics and its U.S. subsidiary were fined $500 million by a U.S. judge for conspiring to artificially inflate the prices of liquid crystal display (LCD) screens in a verdict handed down last month. Two former AU Optronics executives were also given three-year prison sentences. Read More

Hundreds of workers at a Haryana factory for India's biggest carmaker - Maruti Suzuki - are being rounded up by police after a violent clash left a manager dead. The incident has become a symbol of the clash between winners and losers in the country's economic boom. Read More

Protestors have forced Sichuan Hongda to cancel plans to build a $1.6 billion copper alloy plant in Shifang city in southwestern China, because of pollution concerns. The halt has been hailed as a major victory by environmental activists against corporate and government power. Read More

Monsanto, the largest seed corporation in the world, has long dealt out severe legal sanctions against farmers it suspects of "pirating" its seed. Now farmers in Brazil have turned the tables on the company which may have to pay out $7.5 billion. Read More

Adidas, the German sportswear company, is making Olympics uniforms for the UK team at sweatshops in Tangerang city, near the main international airport of Jakarta, Indonesia. Young female workers are paid 5,000 rupiah (54 cents) an hour for a 65 hour work week, according to revelations made in the Independent newspaper. Read More

U.S. imports of sodium thiopental have been banned by a federal judge because of the poor quality of imports. The ruling has struck a serious blow against the death penalty because of the key role the drug plays in lethal injections. Not surprisingly, the state of Texas is furious. Read More