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Vietnamese workers earn less than $2 a day making stuffed animals and Happy Meal toys for U.S. consumers. An ongoing series of wildcat strikes this winter has forced the government to raise wages to prevent factories from moving to other countries.
Listen to an interview about this article with Aaron Glantz on CorpWatch Radio.
One of Wal-Mart Stores Inc.'s most vociferous critics launched a campaign Tuesday with 17 current and former Wal-Mart workers speaking out against health insurance coverage they claim is too expensive, leaving them uninsured or on taxpayer funded programs.
The globalization of work tends to start from the bottom up. The first jobs to be moved abroad are typically simple assembly tasks, followed by manufacturing, and later, skilled work like computer programming. At the end of this progression is the work done by scientists and engineers in research and development laboratories.
OTTAWA -- Protecting the planet for future generations just doesn't cut it any more, judging from the guest list for Earth Summit 2, the worldwide environmental pow-wow set for Johannesburg in August. The World Summit on Sustainable Development -- its official name -- is supposed to refocus international attention on the cause of sustainable development -- but it could be a summit in name only.
Berlin's European Film Market became the backdrop for yet another verbal battle between Wal-Mart and its filmmaker nemesis Robert Greenwald on Tuesday. The Greenwald-directed film "Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price" made for hot sales but heated words at the market.
A group of female employees on Monday filed a $1.4 billion discrimination suit Monday against Germany's Dresdner Bank AG, claiming women are denied equal pay and promotions at the investment bank.
The lawsuit, filed in the Southern District of New York, claims that women aren't allowed to advance to senior levels Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein, the bank's securities unit. About 1% of women who work in its Capital Markets Division are managing directors, compared with 15% of their 1,700 male counterparts, according to the complaint, which is seeking class-action status.
In 1996, Darius Mehri, a wide-eyed young American engineer, went to Japan to work for Toyota's production system. What he found was an abusive environment where the company controlled every movement - inside and outside work - of its employees.
The truth behind the chocolate is anything but sweet. On the Ivory Coast of Africa, the origin of nearly half of the world's cocoa, hundreds of thousands of children work or are enslaved on cocoa farms. With poverty running rampant and average cocoa revenues ranging from $30-$108 per household member per year, producers have no choice but to utilize child labor for dangerous farming tasks. Some children, seeking to help their poor families, even end up as slaves on cocoa farms far from home. Slavery drags on and we are paying the slaveholder's wages.
Social audits of clothing factories in developing countries are failing to detect excessive and forced overtime, abusive treatment of workers and violations of freedom of association, says a report by the Clean Clothes Campaign, a coalition of trade unions and pressure groups, to be published today.
CALGARY -- Canada is committed to preserving and protecting the environment during all phases of the G-8 Summit which is set to open in Kananaskis, Alberta on Thursday and Friday, government environmental officials have pledged. A parallel peoples' forum, the Group of Six Billion, says theirs is the gathering that reflects full respect for the environment and human rights.