Search

The Missouri Prisoners Labor Union (MPLU) announced today that it is initiating an international boycott against all products produced either directly or indirectly by Colgate Palmolive.

The murder of 13-year-old Irma Angelica Rosales should lead to a time of reflection about the nature of the north American economy. To a degree we seldom stop to consider, women and children increasingly provide the labor base of the North American economy, including what supposedly represents its most "advanced" sectors.

In Los Angeles, workers from six factories who sewed for the popular women's clothing line Forever 21 are calling for an official boycott. The workers are owed hundreds of thousands of dollars in minimum wage and overtime pay. They worked long hours in unsafe and unsanitary conditions. And, some of the workers were fired for speaking out about the poor conditions.

Workers angered by General Motors' (GM.N) plan to shut down an assembly plant in Portugal will stage protests starting next week at GM factories in Germany and Spain, a labor source told Reuters on Friday.

In a January 29 letter the Alliance for a Corporate-Free UN documented several human rights violations and environmental abuses by companies signed on to the UN's Global Compact. Corporations that join the compact are supposed to voluntarily adhere to a series of human right and environmental principles. Instead of addressing the charges of rights violations, UN officials accused CorpWatch and the Alliance of being ''misinformed.'' In the correspondence, CorpWatch disputes the Global Compact Office's assertions point by point.

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.

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.

First hand accounts of two workers who sued a San Diego-based medical manufacturer after a workplace accident.

In the mile-high mountains of the Sonora desert, just 25 miles south of the border between Arizona and Mexico, over two thousand miners have been locked in a bitter industrial war since mid-November. Here Grupo Mexico operates North America's oldest, and one of the world's largest copper mines -- Cananea -- in a town which has been a symbol of anti-government insurrection for almost 100 years.

The second article in our series on Global Compact companies focuses on Nike. This article, based on ''Still Waiting for Nike to Do It,'' a recent report published by Global Exchange in San Francisco, finds that Nike continually fails to uphold ''freedom of association and the effective recognition of the right to collective bargaining,'' which is Principle 3 of the Global Compact. Nike made a commitment to respect this right in 1997 when it signed the Fair Labor Association voluntary workplace code of conduct along with other giant shoe and garment manufacturers like Reebok, Adidas, Liz Claiborne and Patagonia. This article covers the period since 1997.

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.

The international union movement, student organizations, womens groups, human rights advocates, faith-based activists, solidarity groups, immigrants, environmentalists, unemployed people, small farmers and business people will come together in a week of action to reject the global economic system that values profits over people.

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.

More than 250 Vietnamese garment workers are stranded in American Samoa, lacking money, jobs and fearful of punishment if they return home.

The latest victim of Enronitis may be ABB, the Zurich-based engineering giant whose founder and former CEO Percy Barnevik was once considered to be the Jack Welch of Europe. Beset by several quarters of disappointing performance, problems seem to be piling up at ABB amid investor fears of unrevealed woes at a company that had prided itself on using U.S.-style multinationalism and savage cost-cutting to become a model European business.

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.

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.