Reynolds, Del Monte, Chiquita Top List of Worst Companies for Freedom of Association
Last Friday, International Human Rights Day, the International Labor Rights Forum (ILRF) named R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. as one of the world’s worst companies of 2010 for workers’ freedom of association. Of the top five worst companies, three are headquartered in the United States: R.J. Reynolds, Chiquita Brands International and Fresh Del Monte Produce.
According to the ILRF, R.J. Reynolds’ annual profits top $2 billion, but the workers who pick the tobacco that goes into the company’s products barely make $8,000 a year, just one-third of the official poverty level for a family of four.
Executives of the nation’s second-largest tobacco company continue to refuse to meet with workers to discuss working conditions. The Farm Labor Organizing Committee (FLOC) reports that the tobacco workers suffer from racism, harassment, lethal pesticides, nicotine poisoning and lack of labor and human rights as well as poverty.
Reverse Trick-or-Treaters Call Attention to Child Labor in Cocoa Fields
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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.
Workers, Activists Rally for Release of Bangladesh Labor Rights Leaders
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Jeff Vogt, associate director of AFL-CIO International Department, reports on today’s rally at the Embassy of Bangladesh in Washington, D.C.
Some 30 trade union and labor activists from the AFL-CIO, AFT, International Labor Rights Forum (ILRF), United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS) and others rallied in front of the Embassy of Bangladesh today to protest the continued imprisonment on unsubstantiated charges of the leaders of the Bangladesh Center for Worker Solidarity (BCWS).
The arrests of Kalpona Akter and Babul Ahkter follow recent worker protests over minimum wages in the ready-made garment industry. The police rounded up the BCWS leaders even though they were were not involved in destroying property during one such protest rally. The move appears to be part of an overall strategy to intimidate and chill legitimate workers’ rights activity in the industry.
The government recently has taken away the labor rights organization’s registration. BCWS and other workers’ rights groups in Bagladesh report that another BCWS leader was detained and tortured. While the leader was detained, BCWS says authorities unsuccessfully attempted to force a confession that would implicate the group’s leadership of illegal activity.
At 20 cents per hour, garment workers’ wages are by far the lowest of any major apparel producing country. Often, workers are not even paid. They also face hazardous working conditions, and several lost their lives recently in major factory fires.
Rally organizers promised to return to the embassy until BCWS leaders are released.
Workers Rally Against Child Labor in Uzbekistan
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Outside the embassy of Uzbekistan today, nearly 100 union members and allies from the Washington, D.C., area rallied to show their support for Uzbek children subjected to child labor. Millions of children, some as young as age 7, could be subjected to long hours of labor in cotton fields this fall.
As young people across the United States have returned to school, children in Uzbekistan are being removed from their classes to pick cotton during the current harvest season. Every year, Uzbek state officials order millions of children, as young as 10 years old, and their teachers to leave school and harvest cotton under hazardous working conditions.
In a statement read on behalf of AFL-CIO Executive Vice President Arlene Holt Baker, Stan Gacek from the AFL-CIO International Affairs Department said forced child labor is in violation of not only international labor standards, but basic decency.
Uzbekistan is the sixth largest producer of cotton in the world, earning over $1 billion yearly, and the cotton picked by Uzbek children is processed into the clothes we buy in the United States. Where does this money go?
Workers Push for Fair Wages in Asian Garment Industry
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Workers in Asia, the United States, United Kingdom and throughout Europe are mobilizing to secure a living wage for garment workers in Asia. The Asia Floor Wage is focused on making sure that the more than 100 million mostly women workers in the Asian garment industry receive adequate wages for what they produce.
Launched on Oct. 7, World Day for Decent Work, the Asia Floor Wage is pushing for a minimum wage equivalent to $475 for a month with a 48-hour workweek. That’s twice what Indonesian laborers get. It’s three times the minimum rate of pay in Sri Lanka and more than six times the wage in Bangladesh.
Today Is World Day for Decent Work
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Today is World Day for Decent Work, and union members in more than 100 countries are mobilizing to address the global economic and employment crisis and demand fundamental reform of the world economy.
The deepest global recession since the 1930s has led to a jobs crisis with millions of people out of work. The International Labor Organization (ILO) predicts that as many as 50 million more workers could be kicked out of jobs worldwide in the next year and could lead to a dramatic increase in the number of working poor.
Live online coverage of the activities around the world, including videos, photographs and messages from events in every continent, will be broadcast on a special website, www.wddw.org, which will be updated via a 24-hour live feed.
Fight Child Labor in Uzbekistan
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As the harvest season for cotton in Uzbekistan begins, 2 million Uzbek children, some as young as six or seven and ranging up to 15, will be forced to spend their days picking cotton instead of attending classes.
Earlier this month, the U.S. Labor Department included cotton from Uzbekistan on a list of goods produced by forced and child labor. Each year during the three-month harvest, Uzbek authorities shut down hundreds of schools, hospitals and public offices. Along with the children, thousands of teachers, doctors and public administrators are forced into the fields.
The International Labor Rights Forum (ILRF) has joined with AFT and a broad range of organizations in the United States and Central Asia to call for an end to forced child labor in Uzbekistan. You can act today to stop this shameful practice by signing a petition here.
All supporters who sign the petition by Oct. 2 will have their names put on a special cotton quilt that will be unveiled at a rally in front of the Uzbek embassy in Washington, D.C., on Oct. 14. To get more involved in this action, e-mail volunteer@ilrf.org.
New Reports Detail Global Child Labor Products and Abuses
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Child labor, says U.S. Labor Secretary Hilda Solis, continues to be a serious global “problem in 21st century society” and says the United States “must do everything in our power to end these shameful practices.”
Solis’ comments came with the release earlier this month of three new reports by the Labor Department’s Bureau of International Labor Affairs (ILAB). The central report is a list of goods believed to have been produced by child or forced labor and it includes 122 products from 58 nations.
The report includes many products companies around the globe use as raw materials for finished products that are purchased by U.S. consumers. They include cotton, sugar cane, tobacco, coffee, rice, cocoa, bricks, garments, carpets, footwear, gold and coal.
Brian Campbell, International Labor Rights Forum director of policy and legal programs, calls the new list:
a critical tool that consumers and businesses can use to identify the sectors where forced and child labor abuses continue…this list helps to focus attention on problematic sectors and the challenge now is to implement business practices that lead to higher labor standards and living and working conditions for workers.
Click here for the report, “2008 List of Goods Produced by Child Labor or Forced Labor.”
Colombian Workers Pay High Price for Flowers
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This Mother’s Day, remember the mothers in Colombia who grew, cut and trimmed the flowers you receive. Six days a week, Amanda Camacho and thousands of her co-workers at flower plantations in Colombia cut and trim at least 350 flowers an hour. In the weeks before holidays like Mother’s Day and Valentine’s Day, the work extends deep into the night—all for about $8 a day, less than the cost of a bouquet of carnations in the United States.
Speaking today at a brown bag luncheon at the AFL-CIO in Washington, Camacho, a Colombian union leader and activist, said the mostly female flower workers in Colombia are treated like slaves and the flower companies’ claims that they are treating their workers well are simply “lies.’
Camacho begins a national tour next week sponsored by the International Labor Rights Forum’s (ILRF) Fairness in Flowers campaign, Jobs with Justice (JwJ), the Coalition of Labor Union Women and U.S. Labor Education in the Americas Project (USLEAP).
Workers to Highlight Employee Free Choice on Human Rights Day
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In hundreds of cities across the nation, workers will mark International Human Rights Day on Dec. 10 with a campaign to educate the public and build momentum to pass the Employee Free Choice Act. International Human Rights Day falls each year on the anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which includes the freedom to form unions. This is the 60th anniversary of the declaration in 1948.
In Boston, representatives from a dozen community and labor organizations will gather to kick off a statewide campaign in support of the legislation, which would give workers a simple one-step process to freely choose a union. It also would strengthen penalties against companies that intimidate employees trying to form unions and provide for mediation and arbitration when employers and workers cannot agree on a first contract.
