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The battle over the Employee Free Choice Act

August 1, 2008

For some background, here is how the AFL-CIO sums up the Employee Free Choice Act:

[T]he current system for forming unions and bargaining is broken. Every
day, corporations deny workers the freedom to decide for themselves
whether to form unions to bargain for a better life. They routinely intimidate, harass, coerce and even fire workers who try to form unions and bargain for economic well-being.

 

NEW Firestone Campaign Video!

July 28, 2008

Tim Newman, Campaigns Assistant, International Labor Rights Forum

Check out the newest Stop Firestone campaign video by clicking here or watch it below.  The video is an interview conducted by Emira Woods, co-director of Foreign Policy in Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies, with Edwin Cisco, Secretary General of the Firestone Agricultural Workers of Liberia, and Christian Levesque of Conrad & Scherer.  Check it out and spread it around!  Don't forget to check out the Stop Firestone campaign website for more information and to take action.

The need for aggressive enforcement of sweatfree purchasing policies

July 25, 2008

With such a close monitoring system in place, it is difficult to
understand how such egregious violations could have still been
happening. However, it seems as though Jin Shun was very strategic in
concealing these. The company provided workers with mock question and
answer sheets to memorize in case they were ever questioned about
conditions in the factory. They also provided falsified time records to
labor investigators – which, if correct, would show that workers
produced an entire piece of clothing in less than one minute. It is
amazing how long this system worked without being discovered and that
workers were being trained to cover up for their disgustingly inhumane
employers.

Working Women in Pakistan are being Stripped of all Labor Rights

July 24, 2008

Organizations like Mennonite Economic Development Associates (MEDA) and Canadian International Development Agency
(CIDA) have undertaken a few
initiatives to address this growing concern in Pakistan. Their most
recent project titled “Pathway and Purse-strings: Market Access for
Women Producers in Pakistan” is geared towards providing marginalized
female producers with resources to access markets, where their goods
are in high demand. This particular program is estimated to improve the
economic condition of 16,000 to 20,000 women in rural Pakistan. (see

Working women are stripped of labor protections wherever they go

July 23, 2008

Domestic work is obviously difficult to regulate because workers aren’t
employed on an individual basis, especially when workers are migrating
from country to country, often without documentation.  What is more
disturbing is that women who are working in formal export industries
such as agriculture, textiles, and fish processing, with high
production demands in the US market, also lack most legal rights and
protections. If labor laws can protect these workers, they’re
systematically un-enforced.

NGO's=Terrorists? Uribe and The Wall Street Journal Think So

July 23, 2008

But the real twist came when footage
taken by a cameraman at the rescue showed one of the men from the Colombian
intelligence team wearing a bib bearing the logo of the American Red
Cross. Though Colombian President Alvaro
Uribe claims that the man acted alone and decided to put the shirt on because
he was “nervous,” many pundits find it hard to believe that this wasn’t part of
the plan all along. And if it was, it seems even more questionable that Uribe,
who in the past has accused human rights groups of being little more than
fronts for leftist groups in the country, would exploit the very connection he
had spent so much time attacking.

Join us in calling for justice in Zimbabwe!

July 19, 2008

TRANSAFRICA
FORUM and the COALITION OF BLACK TRADE UNIONISTS

JUSTICE
FOR ZIMBABWE

  • A Transitional Government

  • A New Constitution

  • Economic Justice – Workers Rights, A
    Debt Audit,

    Repatriation
    of Stolen Assets

  • People-driven Social Investment

  • A National "Truth and
    Reconciliation" Process to Begin National Healing

Monday,
July 21, 2008


4:30
pm – 6:30 pm


The
Embassy of Zimbabwe
18th Street and New Hampshire Avenue, N.W.
Washington, DC

Local unions, self-interest, and global solidarity

July 18, 2008

These questions, and many others, came to mind when meeting with local
unions in New Jersey this past week. The purpose of meeting with local
New Jersey unions was to talk about a campaign, and identify places of
potential collaboration in our work and their work. However, on a more
philosophical level, we were working on talking to these unions about
the importance of supporting international labor rights issues – issues
that might not be in the immediate self-interest of local unions.

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