Reverse Trick-or-Treaters Call Attention to Child Labor in Cocoa Fields
 |
|
Don’t be surprised if the “trick-or-treaters” at your front door this Halloween give you something in return for the candy or fruit you hand them. This year on Oct. 31, children, students and adults across the country will hand out fair trade chocolates attached to an informational card about child labor abuses in the cocoa industry.
The human rights group Global Exchange, in cooperation with Equal Exchange , a fair trade coop, is sponsoring “Reverse Trick-or-Treating” to call attention to the abuse of some 3.6 million children in the cocoa fields of West Africa.
For more information or to get involved in Reverse Trick-or-Treating, click here.
Help Stop Child Labor in the Cocoa Fields
With the Easter holiday approaching, many U.S. children and their parents will celebrate with chocolate bunnies and other chocolate-covered treats. But for children in West Africa, Easter will simply be another desolate day of harvesting cocoa, the main ingredient in chocolate, under inexcusable conditions.
AFT has launched a campaign to stop the importation of child-harvested cocoa beans or chocolate made from them. You can take action. Click here to send a message to U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack urging him to ensure chocolate products Americans eat are not spoiled by the bitterness of child labor.
More than half of the world’s supply of cocoa is harvested in the two West African nations of Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire (Ivory Coast). Growing and harvesting the crop depends upon the labor of 3.6 million children caught in the worst forms of child labor, according to the International Cocoa Verification Board (ICVB). Children must climb trees with machetes to cut down cocoa pods. They handle and apply dangerous pesticides, burn brush and carry back-breaking loads, ICVB says. ICVB is non-profit, multi-stakeholder organization that monitors child and forced labor in cocoa production.
Ghana’s Union Movement Joins Call for Employee Free Choice Act
 |
|
With President Obama visiting Ghana this weekend, unions in that nation asked him to support workers’ freedom to form unions around the world.
The Ghana Federation of Labor (GFL) joined with the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) for a July 7-8 conference on union rights around the world, with a focus on the Employee Free Choice Act, the International Labor Organization (ILO) and the role of U.S. labor law in setting standards for the world.
These international unions are concerned about the rise of U.S. union-busting firms and the spread of union-busting tactics around the world, as well as U.S. firms creating downward wage pressures and corporate-dominated global institutions forcing development models on nations around the world that put profits ahead of workers.
Global Support Growing for Employee Free Choice
Since Friday, when we wrote about international union support for the Employee Free Choice Act, more letters backing this critical legislation have poured in from around the world.
In separate letters to United Steelworkers (USW) President Leo Gerard, leaders of unions in eight countries, along with an international union federation, have expressed solid support for the bill. The latest letters come from all corners of the world: Paraguay, Japan, Ghana, Argentina, Brazil, Indonesia, Thailand and Togo, the base of the 13-member International Federation of Chemical, Energy, Mine and General Workers’ Unions (ICEM).
