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In April this year, with much fanfare, US President Bill Clinton announced the introduction of a new ''No Sweatshop'' Code of Conduct for US Apparel and Footwear companies. The code is voluntary, but high profile companies like Nike Inc., Reebok International Ltd. and Liz Claiborne Inc. were among the ten initial signatories. These companies agreed that a set of minimum standards for working conditions in factories would be adhered to in the production of their goods -- wherever that production occurs.

During a two-week period in September 1996, U.S. Department of Labor Officials travelled to six countries -- the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, India and the Philippines -- as part of a major study of codes of conduct in the garment industry. The outcome was a report, The Apparel Industry and Codes of Conduct: A Solution to the International Child Labor Problem? (U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of International Labor Affairs, 1996).

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.

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.

The best known, most prestigious, and largest keiretsu, is the Mitsubishi Group of companies. Given the size and reach of its diverse activities, and due to the fact that it is more heavily focused in polluting industrial sectors than other keiretsu, the Mitsubishi Group may well be the single most environmentally destructive corporate force on Earth.

For women working in Mexican assembly plants, known as maquiladoras, insisting on their legal rights takes what are colloquially referred to as cojones. It indicates that Mexico's low wage feminine labor force may not be as docile as foreign employers would like to believe. It also is a harbinger of an incipient movement inside Mexico's expanding export-processing sector.

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.

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.

Al Gore has raised more money than any other Democratic presidential candidate in history. But his pandering to rich and powerful comes at a cost to the public.

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.

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.

Maquiladora workers voice constant fears about their safety on the job. In the electronics industry alone, workers are exposed to a variety of substances which include xylene, trichloroethylene, zinc and lead oxides, and nitric acid. Not only electronics assembly but other industries as well expose workers to the materials used in thinners, paints, solvents, resins, solders, dyes, flux, and acetone. Exposure to such substances without proper protection can cause cancer, reproductive problems, skin diseases, vision problems, respiratory impairments, gastrointestinal and nervous disorders, and headaches and fatigue.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.''

Sneaker maker Converse Inc., best known for its basketball and ''Chuck Taylor'' brand shoes, is closing three North American production plants and shifting production to Asia as part of a Chapter 11 bankruptcy reorganization.

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.