LabourStart’s Photo of the Year: Child Labor in Bangladesh
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Subscribers to the global online labor news service LabourStart selected K.M. Asad’s striking photo of a Bangladeshi boy working in a shipbuilding plant as the Labor Photo of the Year. These factories employ young boys as apprentices without pay for the first few years. They work in extreme conditions without safety tools or other protective gears.
The photo contest is designed to encourage and recognize the talents of worker-photographers around the world while encouraging activists to tell the stories of workers’ struggles in photos. This is the group’s second photo contest. Click here to see the 2009 finalists.
The first prize is a two-year pro account on Flickr.com. The runners-up received a one-year pro account. The finalist photos also are displayed in the art gallery on the Union Island in Second Life.
Immigration Laws, U.S. Trade Policy Hurt All Workers
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Large corporations and the lobbyists they employ in Washington are running a familiar “game” on workers in the United States, Latin America and Mexico. The object of the game is to get as much out the workers at the cheapest price. What most people don’t think about is how U.S. trade and immigration policy are both part of the game.
Photojournalist David Bacon, author of Illegal People: How Globalization Creates Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants, who spoke at the AFL-CIO in Washington, D.C., last night, says our flawed trade policies “enforce poverty in other countries.”
Bacon says so-called free trade exacerbates poverty and inequality in our trading partners, spurring migration flows. One example he cites is the way the North American Free Trade Agreement opened the Mexican corn market to cheaply produced U.S. corn, making it impossible for Mexican farmers to “get a price for their corn that would pay for the cost of growing it.”
