Creating a Sweatfree World

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Plantation Workers Look for Justice in the North

Los Angeles Times
05/27/2007

CHINANDEGA, Nicaragua - The people crammed into the stifling basketball gym. They filled the court, lined the walls and tumbled beyond the doors onto the sun-blistered streets.

They had gathered to hear a promise of justice.

Many had spent their lives toiling on banana plantations that U.S. companies operated in this region some 30 years ago. By day, the workers had harvested bunches of fruit to ship to North American tables. At night, some had sprayed pesticide into the warm, humid air to protect the trees from insects and rot...  

International Labor Rights Fund Endorses the Apparel Industry Partnership Agreement

ILRF
12/04/1998

The Board of Directors of the International Labor Rights Fund voted this week to endorse the agreement completed one month ago that establishes a Fair Labor Association to oversee garment and footwear production around the world for the U.S. market. The agreement was the product of intense negotiations involving two trade unions, five human rights, labor rights, consumer and religious organizations and ten apparel and footwear producers over the past 27 months.

ILRF ToTrain NGO Factory Monitors

ILRF
11/22/1999

The International Labor Rights Fund (ILRF) is pleased to announce a new pilot project to enable labor advocates in four countries to monitor factory conditions. We will work together with local partners in Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador and Taiwan to monitor conditions in factories producing university-licensed apparel. We will also work with local NGOs and trade unions in Indonesia to monitor factories producing shoes and garments for companies involved in the Fair Labor Association.

Capitalism in the raw

The Economist
01/24/2004

Labour rights and free trade with the United States

Every weekday, Dora Amelia Ramos, a single mother, leaves her breeze-block home in a village south of San Salvador at 6am to go to her job at a maquila factory making clothes for export from imported cloth. Earning the minimum wage of just over $5 a day, she is perched on one of the lower rungs of the world economy. But she counts herself lucky to have a job at all. That is because she is a trade unionist.

Labor supporters wary of trade pact

Houston Chronicle
05/11/2004

By JENALIA MORENO

Factory worker Norma Escobar suspected financial troubles at the Carolina Apparel plant in La Libertad, El Salvador, when her $30-a-week paychecks started arriving late.

Soon, the factory where pants, overalls and jeans were hastily fashioned by the nimble fingers of mostly female stitchers for U.S. retailers closed. It left 350 unemployed workers for the North Carolina company short nearly $80,000 in back wages and severance pay, according to Women's Edge Coalition, a human rights group.

Anti-Sweatshop Movement Is Achieving Gains Overseas

The New York Times
01/26/2000

By STEVEN GREENHOUSE

Apparel and footwear factories overseas have slowly improved working conditions in response to a highly vocal anti-sweatshop movement, labor rights advocates say.

Pressure from college students and other opponents of sweatshops has led some factories that make goods for industry giants like Nike and the Gap to cut back on child labor, to use less dangerous chemicals and to require fewer employees to work 80-hour weeks, according to groups that monitor such factories.

Chinese Workers Pay for Wal-Mart's Low Prices

The Washington Post
02/08/2004

By Peter S. Goodman and Philip P. Pan

Page A01

SHENZHEN, China -- Inside the factory, amid clattering machinery and clouds of sawdust, men without earplugs or protective goggles feed wood into screaming electric saws, making cabinets for stereo speakers. Women hunch over worktables, many hands bandaged and few covered by gloves, pressing transistors into circuit boards.

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