Labor

The Pakistan Accord on Health and Safety in the Textile and Garment Industry signed in December 2022 is designed to prevent tragedies like the Ali Enterprises factory fire in 2012 in Karachi, Pakistan that killed some 260 workers. It is modeled on a similar initiative that was created in Bangladesh after the Rana Plaza Fire that killed over 1,100. Read More

Three workers at PT Tainan Enterprise, a garment factory in Jakarta, Indonesia, were fired in August 2021, allegedly for joining a branch of the Federasi Serikat Buruh Garment Tekstil (FSB Garteks or Federation of Textile and Garment Workers Union). In May 2022, PT Tainan fired Rahmawati, the next president of the union. Tainan agreed to rehire Rahmawati in November 2022, after government mediators intervened as well as international buyers and IndustriALL Global Union. Read More

Photographs and interviews with dozens of Indonesian fishermen by the Environmental Justice Foundation, a UK based investigative NGO, and Mongabay have revealed that Dalian Ocean Fishing is using banned equipment to harvest shark fins, in violation of international law. Read More

COVID-19 mortality rates at eldercare homes in Madrid managed by private companies DomusVi and Orpea were close to double that of eldercare homes in public hands during the first wave of the pandemic, as illustrated in a new map published by CorpWatch. Read More

CorpWatch is publishing a guide to over a dozen of the worst companies profiting from healthcare privatization in Europe. Workers are being paid less, clinics are being shut, and worse yet: people's health is suffering and death rates are increasing to line the pockets of investors and top managers. Read More

La tasa de mortalidad por covid-19 en las residencias de mayores de Madrid gestionadas por las empresas privadas DomusVi y Orpea durante la primera ola de la pandemia fue casi el doble de la tasa en las residencias de mayores de titularidad pública, ilustrado en un nuevo mapa publicado por CorpWatch. Read More

ArcelorMittal, the steel giant, has promised to invest $1 billion to upgrade its mining and metallurgical complex in Temirtau, Kazakhstan, where dozens of workers have died in industrial accidents in recent years and the pollution is so bad that winter snow sometimes turns black. Read More

As many as 300 migrant workers who staged a protest against the Bandary International Group in Qatar for failure to pay wages have been arrested and may have been deported back to their home countries, as the country gears up for the World Cup football tournament in November 2022. Read More

Protests over working conditions are mounting against Coupang, the biggest e-commerce website in South Korea. In July, workers took an air conditioner on a 50 kilometer march from the company headquarters to a Hwaseong warehouse to bring attention to their demands for respite from record high temperatures this summer. Read More

Employees of an Apple sales outlet in Towson, a suburb of Baltimore, Maryland, voted to unionize in June 2022 to become the Big Tech company’s first unionized store in the U.S. This is part of a larger movement across the country, with workers at many companies like Amazon, Starbucks and Trader Joe’s expressing their interest in joining a union. Read More