By Staff, Haiti Grassroots Watch. Part 2 of 7. “It’s a big error to bet on the slave-wage labor, on breaking the backs of workers who are paid nothing while [foreign] companies get rich. It’s not only an error, it’s a crime…. [Assembly factories] work with imported materials, they’re enclaves. They don’t have much effect on the economy.” – Haitian economist Camille Chalmers. (English | French)
Continue reading →By Cam McGrath, IPS. Egypt recently approved its first ever minimum wage for the private sector, bringing it in line with the minimum wage for public sector employees set at 700 Egyptian pounds (US $117) per month. “In Cairo, you’d be lucky to find a small apartment for that price. But then you have to eat, and that’s expensive too.” – A gas meter inspector. (English | Spanish)
Continue reading →By Staff, Haiti Grassroots Watch. Part 1 of 7. In Haiti, the minimum wage went from $3.00 per day in 1982, to 200 gourdes today, which is about $1.61 PER DAY in 1982 dollars. This represents a 46 percent drop in real salary compared to 1982 wages. (English | French)
Continue reading →By Staff, BBC News | Commentary by Dady Chery, Haiti Chery. In China, Beijing offers the best hourly rate of 13 yuan ($2), and Shenzhen guarantees the highest monthly minimum wage of 1,320 yuan ($207). As surplus capacity from the U.S.-Europe recession causes China to turn to its domestic market, the cost of Chinese-made goods will increase abroad.
Continue reading →By William Lee Adams, Global Spin. An estimated 1,000 demonstrations by public sector workers are taking place throughout the U.K. Union leaders say the Prime Minister was asking for it.
Continue reading →By Staff, Ahram Online | Staff, TV New Zealand. Suez Port workers blocked the delivery of an initial 7-ton shipment of tear gas into Egypt. A three-stage shipment totaling 21 tons is on course for the port from the American port of Wilmington, with tear-gas canisters made by the American company Combined Systems.
Continue reading →By Eduardo Soriano-Castillo, Labor Notes | Staff, Southern Poverty Law Center. Young immigrants in Alabama were joined by allies from labor and civil rights groups for a series of actions to announce they are undocumented and unafraid. UPDATE: Federal District Court halts Alabama law’s discriminatory housing practice.
Continue reading →By David Moberg, In These Times. The push for taxing financial transactions gains steam in Europe.
Continue reading →By Jim Siegel and Joe Vardon, Columbus Dispatch. Voters defeated Senate Bill 5 — Issue 2 — which would have limited collective bargaining by the Ohio public sector, this U.S. state’s biggest employer of people of color.
Continue reading →By Jill Tucker, Carolyn Jones, Will Kane, SF Gate. Thousands of workers and students took to Oakland’s downtown streets today as part of a daylong general strike called by Occupy Oakland organizers to protest economic inequity and corporate greed.
Continue reading →By Ansel Herz, IPS. Port-au-Prince – Workers in Haiti’s apparel manufacturing sector charge that factory owners are repressing attempts to organise in the capital, after the dismissals of six of seven leading members of a new union within just two weeks of its formation. (English | Spanish)
Continue reading →By Kristin Palitza, IPS | Commentary by Dady Chery, Haiti Chery. In response to demands of a living wage from unions of Lesotho’s textile factory workers this summer, the World Bank is recommending to Lesotho’s government that it should ditch its textile industry, after the manufacturers have enjoyed Lesotho’s attractive tax breaks.
Continue reading →By Eduardo Soriano-Castillo, Labor Notes. An all-out attack on immigrant workers, their families, and communities continues in the U.S. South and West. In Alabama, immigrant workers met it with a day of wildcat strikes.
Continue reading →By Andrew Leonard, Salon. “Half the workers of the world work in jobs that are off the books… The combined economic activity of these 1.8 billion workers adds up to $10 trillion. If this informal economy were squeezed into a single political structure, it would be the second largest economy in the world,” Robert Neuwirth writes in Stealth of Nations: The Global Rise of the Informal Economy.
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