Channel: Global Action
Make Valentine’s Day International Flower Workers’ Day
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Tomorrow is Valentine’s Day and tens of millions of us will show our love to that special someone with flowers. But Valentine’s Day also gives us a great opportunity to how our support for the 100,000 mostly women workers in Colombia who work long days to cut and ship flowers for Valentine’s Day.
About 60 percent of all flowers bought in the U.S. come from Colombia. Workers don’t earn enough to support their families, work long hours, suffer sexual harassment, and are fired when they try to form unionse to improve wages and conditions, according to U.S. Labor Education in the Americas Project (USLEAP).
Click here to a sign a letter to Colombian Minister of Labor Rafael Pardo Rueda supporting flower workers and other workers in Colombia who are demanding fair wages, equal treatment and justice.
The letter also urges the Colombian government to implement the spirit and the letter of the Labor Action Plan signed last year with the U.S. government. In October, the AFL-CIO issued a report saying the action plan “has failed to achieve improvements on the ground for Colombia’s working families.” The plan was billed as a major step to ending violence against trade unionists and protecting the right of workers to come together in unions.
Click here for the full report.
250,000 Sign Petition to Apple to End Slave Conditions at Its Suppliers
Outraged at the inhumane treatment of workers in China who make iPads, iPhones and other Apple products, protesters visited a half-dozen Apple stores around the world yesterday to deliver petitions calling for reforms in the working conditions at factories run by Apple’s suppliers, accroding to Democracy Now!
A demonstration at Apple’s Grand Central Terminal store in New York City drew a dozen people, who peacefully handed over a petition with 250,000 signatures to an Apple store manager. Shelby Knox, the director for Change.org, led the effort to collect the signatures.
Knox and New York Times reporter Charles Duhigg, who helped break the story about the horrific conditions involved in producing the world’s most popular products, spoke today with Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman. Also on the show: Mike Daisey, whose one-man play, “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs,” is based partly on his visits to Apple’s Chinese factories and his interviews with the workers there. Daisey pointed out one of the key reasons the ability of Apple suppliers like Foxconn to institute slave-like working conditions–lack of a free labor movement. Read the rest of this entry »
After Two Decades of Darkness, a Daybreak in Burma?
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This is a cross-post from the AFL-CIO Solidarity Center.
Almost 22 years ago, the National League for Democracy (NLD) won a landslide in a free and fair election in Burma—but the military dictatorship refused to let the NLD take power. Instead, the ruling junta crushed the organization and imprisoned its members and activists, including its leader, Aung San Suu Kyi.
In the past six months, Burma seems to be thawing, opening to the outside world it long shunned. And Suu Kyi, who spent many of the interceding years under house arrest—and won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991 for her struggle—is out again among the people, speaking at rallies and renewing her call for democracy.
On a recent trip to Rangoon, I had the opportunity to sit down with Aung San Suu Kyi for a conversation about the future of the labor movement in Burma. We discussed my meetings over the previous few days—with journalists, farmers, textile and garment workers and industrial workers—all of whom had started to form independent unions. She thanked the Solidarity Center and the U.S. labor movement for its support.
Take Action to Help Cleaning Workers in Netherlands
Spreading the work here from our friends at LabourStart, who sent this action request (and plug for its conference this year).
They’re calling it the “uprising of the invisible.”
Cleaning workers in the Netherlands have been on strike for 30 days and have now asked for international solidarity. They’ve created an online campaign on LabourStart which needs your help.
It will take you just one minute to tell their employers—and their employers’ clients—that it’s time to show these workers some respect, and to reach agreement to end the strike.
Please send off your message here today and spread the word.
And one more thing….
We’ve just announced the dates for the third annual LabourStart Global Solidarity Conference, to be held in Sydney, Australia, from Nov. 26-29 2012. To learn more and show your interest in attending, please visit the Event page on Facebook.
Egypt’s New Labor Movement Comes of Age
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This is a cross-post by Ben Moxham of Stronger Unions, the blog from the United Kingdom’s Trade Union Congress (TUC) on the new Egyptian trade union movement that has its roots in last year’s incredible uprising that toppled the Mubarak government.
Shawna Bader-Blau, executive director of the AFL-CIO’s Solidarity Center, and Lisa McGowan, acting director of the Middle East and North Africa program at the Solidarity Center, participated in the historic founding Congress of the Egyptian Federation of Independent Trade Unions (EFITU). The Congress represented an important step forward in the struggle by Egyptian workers to form free and independent unions.
On the desert-battered outskirts of Cairo, in a kitsch marble convention center, the Egyptian Federation of Independent Trade Unions (EFITU) has just announced to Egypt and the world that it has come of age. EFITU was born in the inspiration and chaos of Tahrir square, exactly 12 months to the day. Since then they have been organizing, organizing and organizing. Today was a chance to show the results and I was blown away.
The federation claims to have organized a phenomenal 2 million workers into 200 unions in barely a year. Of course, many of the new independent unions have their roots in the underground workers’ struggles throughout the past decade. And without clear ways to keep membership records, the total figure may be in doubt, but as an accurate figure emerges it will still be the single most impressive organizing effort I’ve ever come across (and this is just one of the two new independent federations: the Egyptian Democratic Labor Congress [EDLC] claims to have signed up 214 unions with a seven figure combined membership also).
Legitimacy means everything to this nascent movement. So long denied a voice in the workplace and a voice in society, they are determined to be democratic and everywhere. “We bid farewell to land-lord run unions” of Mubarak, said Kamal Abou Aita, the acting president of EFITU.
And they did so in meticulous-style: each of the 264 delegates would vote, one-by-one, walking up onto the congress stage, showing their ID, filing out their ballot and putting it in a large glass box for the entire hall to see. “How powerful is that?” I thought after the first few votes. “How long will this take?” I thought after three hours and only 140 delegates in. More hours passed and I realized that these guys have pyramid-building patience and that I’d nodded off and drooled a bit.
But by then the party had set in. Us international guests filed some dead air time by firing off our best Read the rest of this entry »
China’s Unfair Trade Puts U.S. Auto Parts Jobs at Risk
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More than 1.6 million American jobs in the nation’s auto supply chain are at risk unless China’s illegal trade practices are curtailed, according to three new reports released today. In a conference call with reporters this afternoon, United Steelworkers (USW) President Leo Gerard said:
China is cheating unmercifully in this sector and we are saying to China—and asking our government to stand up to China and say—“enough is enough.” It is time to enforce our trade policies.
Two reports from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) and one from Stewart and Stewart, a law firm that has won cases challenging China’s unfair trade practices, detail China’s persistent and growing violations of World Trade Organization (WTO) rules and outline plans by China’s government to use these same tactics to boost their auto parts exports even further.
In the past 10 years alone, China’s auto parts exports to the United States have increased by 850 percent, while jobs in the parts industry declined by more than 400,000. Says Scott Paul, executive director of the Alliance for American Manufacturing (AAM): Read the rest of this entry »
iPhone Supplier Equates Workers with ‘1 Million Animals’
The horror stories out of China’s mega-sweatshop, Foxconn, just get worse and worse. Foxconn is the employer of hundreds of thousands of workers who make iPhones and other cool gadgets in working conditions so odious the company dorms where they live are now swathed in nets to prevent suicides.
So what does Terry Gou, chairman of Foxconn’s parent company, Hon Hai Precision Industry, have to say? According to the Guardian, Gou told an end of year party, at which the director of Tapei Zoo was asked to share his management techniques:
Hon Hai has a workforce of over one million and as human being are also animals, to manage 1 million animals gives me a headache.
Vote for Vale as World’s Worst Multinational
Brian Finnegan, in the AFL-CIO International Department, sends us this.
Vale, the largest iron ore company in the world with locations in 38 countries is one of six finalists for the Public Eye Award, which annually elects the worst company in the world by popular vote. The winner will be announced during this week’s World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. It is the first time that a Brazilian-based company is in the running for the award.
Vote here. The deadline for voting is Jan. 26.
The International Network of People Affected by Valen nominated the company for the 2012 Public Eye Award, through the Brazilian organization “Justice on the Rails,” and in partnership with the international NGOs Amazon Watch and International Rivers. The organizations say Vale deserves the award because of its many detrimental environmental, social and labor impacts in Brazil and worldwide over the past decade.
Which Is Better? Prison or Work at China’s Foxconn?
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Stumping for president, Republican candidates have finally figured out that the public cares more about job creation than deficit reduction. But their solutions involve luring corporations back to this country from overseas by eliminating regulatory policies that could make working conditions here a lot more similar to those offshore. A recent Jon Stewart segment shows just what that would entail.
Pointing to recent news reports that describe the slave-like conditions at China’s Foxconn factory, where 800,000 workers make iPhones, iPads, Kindles and most other Apple products, Stewart notes that most Apple products are made in China,
the Communist country where corporations get the respect they deserve.
So, to compete with China, Stewart continues,
we’ve got to make our factories look more like this Foxconn.
At Foxconn, Read the rest of this entry »
Illegal Procedure? Dallas Cowboys Called on Sweatshop Connections
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Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones spent $1 billion to build the gilded palace his legendary National Football League team plays in eight Sundays a year. But in the gift shops inside Cowboys Stadium and in sports apparel stores around the nation, Cowboys fans are buying fancy jackets, jerseys and other gear made by Cambodian workers earning just 29 cents an hour for 10-hour days, six days a week.
And now the Cowboys merchandising arm—Silver Star Merchandising—is pursuing deals with major U.S. universities for exclusive rights to produce the schools’ logo apparel, reports ESPN’s Outside the Lines. A recent episode spotlighted the Cambodian supplier’s factory where workers:
fear the wrath of their supervisors if they talk to a co-worker sitting next to them or take too long at the bathroom. They say they are essentially forced to work overtime daily and describe a hostile work environment in which supervisors yell and insult them. They work while sick because either they can’t afford to go to the doctor or fear they will be fired if they miss work.
One of the schools Silver Star has its sights set on is Ohio State and student activists Read the rest of this entry »
