international

  • Police Evict Kraft Workers from Factory in Argentina
    Oct 24 2009 - 1:07am

    Argentinean workers took over their cookie factory August 18 in response to intensifying attacks from their employer, Kraft Foods. The workers camped inside their plant for almost six weeks until police forced them out.

  • Mexican Government Seizes Power Plants, Liquidates Dissident Union
    Dan La Botz
    Oct 13 2009 - 5:24pm

    Over the weekend Federal Police seized the plants of the Central Light and Power Company of Mexico, which provides electricity to Mexico City and several states in central Mexico.

  • Mexican Government Prepares to Seize Power Stations and Break Electrical Workers Union
    Dan LaBotz
    Sep 29 2009 - 4:56pm

    The Mexican Preventive Police are preparing to occupy the facilities of the Central Light and Power Company in Mexico City in an attempt to break the militant Mexican Electrical Workers Union.

  • Chinese Labor Activist Brutally Assaulted in Shenzhen

    Body:

    Workers’ rights advocates are calling on the Chinese government to investigate a ruthless November 21 knife attack on a prominent labor activist in Shenzhen, a major manufacturing center in southern China.

    Shenzhen labor activist Huang Qingnan was stabbed November 21. This is not the first attack on Huang. In 1999, then a rank-and-file activist in a food factory, Huang was permanently disfigured when acid was thrown on his face while he slept in the factory dormitory.

    Huang Qingnan works for the Dagongzhe Migrant Workers Center, a small group that counsels workers on their legal rights. The center has helped low-paid factory workers file hundreds of claims for injuries and unfair dismissals. Employers have been held liable for large amounts of severance pay, and it is assumed that an employer is behind the attack.

    Expiration Date:
    Wed, 01/30/2008 - 2:00pm

  • What If Citizens Got To Decide the City Budget? Brazil’s Workers Party Tries "Participatory Budgeting"

    Micah Maidenberg

    Brazil will vote for a new president October 6. If the Workers Party (or PT, for Partido dos Trabahadores) wins, South America’s largest country will be governed by a party that was created by the labor movement and dedicated to building movements of workers and the poor...

    Yes
  • NAFTA Labor Black Hole Lessons for the Fast Track Debate

    by Sarah Anderson

    Five years ago, Mexican workers at two factories in Tamaulipas state owned by U.S.-based Breed Technologies initiated a work stoppage to protest unsafe working conditions. Workers in these two plants, called Customtrim and Autotrim, glue and sew leather around automobile steering wheels and gear shifts. As a result of poor ventilation and the fast pace of work, illnesses and injuries are extremely common. Plant managers, however, tell disabled employees, known as "jonkeados" (junked workers), that their problems are merely psychological...

    Yes
  • Viewpoint: Unity Is Achieved by Confronting Differences, Not Avoiding Them

    Paul Bigman, Lynne Dodson, Mary Ann Schroeder, and Lonnie Nelson

    While we certainly agree that labor must continue our coalition work on globalization, we have concerns with some of the views in Russ Davis’s April Viewpoint...

    Yes
  • An Historical Perspective on War.

    April, 1898: The International Association of Machinists editorial on the sinking of the Maine; the event that led us into the Spanish-American War.


    Yes
  • Immigrants Find High-Tech Servitude in Silicon Valley

    by David Bacon

    When Kim Singh left India to become a contract worker in Silicon Valley, he thought he would find a good job in the electronics industry. Instead, he found a high-tech sweatshop.


    Yes
  • Auto Workers Sanctioned Over Raiding Charges

    by Marsha Niemeijer

    A dispute over which union will represent 30,000 Ontario health care workers is threatening to split the Canadian labor movement. The Canadian Labour Congress has imposed far-reaching sanctions on the Canadian Auto Workers, following accusations that the CAW had attempted to raid eight Ontario locals of the Service Employees International Union. The CLC stripped CAW delegates of the right to vote in district labor councils, provincial labor federations, and other CLC bodies.


    Yes