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Wal-Mart, the largest US retailer, has had to postpone the publication of an online report on its environmental and social sustainability efforts seen by its critics as a test of its commitment to greater corporate transparency on non-financial issues.

When Wal-Mart ann­ounced a push to improve its sustainability record in October 2005, it said it would issue its first report on its progress by spring 2007.

SANDY - They waved signs, shouted slogans and even staged a mock chain gang led by caricatures of Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott and China's President Hu Jintao to dissuade shoppers from visiting the new Wal-Mart Supercenter.

Yet despite their best efforts and the intermittent honking of horns by passers-by sounding their support, the nearly two dozen picketers representing Utah Jobs with Justice and the National Organization for Women failed to thin the number of shoppers looking for bargains.
Still, the protesters were as undaunted...

MYAWADDY, Myanmar -- Shortly after dawn six days a week, scores of young women scramble down a muddy track north of this border town and clamber aboard metal boats for a short trip across the Moei River, the narrow, cocoa-brown boundary between Myanmar and Thailand.

The women, victims of the economic ruin visited on this country by the world's most enduring military dictatorship, are on their way to work in a factory on the opposite riverbank in Thailand. In the late afternoon, they cross back to Myanmar...

SEIU's strategy of creating partnerships with employers is building up steam. What does it mean for the labor movement? At Wal-Mart, low prices mean low wages...all over the world. Workers from India and Colombia say their real employer lives in Bentonville, Arkansas.

K.R. Jayaram and Betty Fuentes were interviewed by Tom Herriman about the impact that Wal-Mart has had the garment industry in Bangalore, India and cut flower plantations in Bogata, Colombia... 

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Sir, When will the retail sector learn that positive action, not a further public relations exercise, is needed in the battle to stamp out labour exploitation in the textiles and food supply chains? ("Big retailers join forces in an effort to fight labour abuses", January 11.) The last thing needed at the moment is another standards initiative joining an already overcrowded field of weaker and weaker codes and a decade of multiple social auditing that has done little or nothing to halt growing labour rights abuses...