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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.
State officials in Tamaulipas say they want U.S. companies to open workshops inside Mexican prisons to help train prisoners for factory jobs.
The proposed legislation is a response to a Knight Ridder Newspapers investigation that found some boys as young as 11 are sold or tricked into slavery to harvest cocoa beans in Ivory Coast, a West African nation that supplies 43 percent of U.S. cocoa. The State Department estimates that as many as 15,000 child slaves work on Ivory Coast's cocoa, cotton and coffee farms. The House of Representatives passed the labeling initiative, 291-115, in late June, and the measure awaits Senate action.
This island nation has long been famed for its transformation from a developing country to an industrial colossus. But a recent labor dispute at a Taiwanese-owned textile factory in impoverished Nicaragua has cast a spotlight on what U.S. activists say is Taiwan's least admired export: labor rights abuses.
Soco International PLC, a UK oil company, has claimed that it will halt oil exploration in Virunga National Park in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), following complaints by local communities and the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) about the potential environmental impact.
A Papua New Guinea (PNG) court revoked two 99 year land titles awarded to Kuala Lumpur Kepong (KLK) of Malaysia to develop palm oil plantations on 38,350 hectares of land in Collingwood Bay in Oro province following complaints of land grabbing by customary landowners.
A deadly explosion in Jiaoshizhen, Sichuan province, has raised concerns about the risks involved in hydraulic fracking in China. The explosion occurred at a facility operated by Sinopec - one of China's biggest oil and gas companies - that is being advised by Breitling Energy, a Dallas-based company.
The 2012 United Nations Rio+20 Conference on Sustainable Development event comes after two decades of major changes in the global environment since the 1992 Earth Summit. One of the biggest differences is the enormous growth in corporate power which will not be addressed by the agreements on the table.
Protestors targeted annual general meetings of Enbridge and Bank of America this week for the devastating environmental consequences of extracting energy from two new and unconventional sources: tar sands and mountain top coal.
The former chief executive officer of ABB, Goran Lindahl, will not be allowed to continue his prestigious post as special advisor to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan. Lindahl was pressured to resign after a pension scandal at ABB.
Puerto Rican citizen groups are protesting two renewable energy projects: a 30 megawatt solar energy project in Yabucoa by Western Wind Energy corporation from Vancouver and a 75 megawatt windmill array in Santa Isabel by Pattern Energy of San Francisco. The reason: these projects will threaten scarce farm land on the food dependent island.