CLEVELAND (AP) -- An anti-sweatshop group says an Ohio-based uniform company has improved conditions at its plant in Honduras, but there remains more to do.

The factory employs about 500 workers and makes uniforms for Dayton-based Lion Apparel and other companies.

SweatFree Communities said Wednesday that a workers-rights group reported in July that employees at the plant worked for below minimum wage, were forced to work overtime and were not enrolled in social security, and that female workers had to take pregnancy tests...

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There was a lot of hoopla over the anti-tax "tea parties" last week, but another group staged a protest a few blocks away from the Capitol, at the Capitol Station Post Office, on Martin Luther King Boulevard.

This protest was by [SweatFree Communities] and coincided with the release of a report, "Subsidizing Sweatshops" (read it at www.sweatfree.org), which catalogs which public-sector apparel manufacturers use sweatshop labor...

In July 2008, SweatFree Communities (SFC) released a report titled, "Subsidizing Sweatshops: How Our Tax Dollars Fund the Race to the Bottom, and What Cities and States Can Do" in which it studied 12 factories in nine countries that produce employee uniforms for nine major companies.

The Ashland Civic Center Council Chambers is normally a place to make decisions about issues such as affordable housing and utility rate increases.

But the room where the City Council meets recently became a temporary gallery.

For some shoppers, when they buy their coffee, a bottle of honey and or that Mexican woodcarving, a "fair trade" label on it is just as important as the taste or the look or the cost.

The fair trade label of one international organization is familiar to at least half of consumers, according to a 2008 survey conducted in 15 countries for Fairtrade Labelling Organizations International.

Yet even as awareness grows, fair trade gins up controversy because the term is difficult to define – unlike, say, setting safe lead-paint levels for toys...