garment workers
kkrisberg | June 14, 2017At the Guardian, Krithika Varagur interviewed workers inside the Indonesian factory that manufactures clothing for Ivanka Trump’s fashion line, finding poverty wages, anti-union intimidation and unreasonably high production targets. The story includes interviews with more than a dozen workers, who asked that details about their identities be changed to avoid being fired. Varagur writes:
Alia is nothing if not industrious. She has worked in factories on and off since leaving her provincial high school, through the birth of two children, leading up to her current job making clothes for brands…
garrettbrown | January 26, 2017Mass firings by garment factories and a wave of government arrests of union leaders and worker rights advocates threatens the gains made in improving workplace health and safety for the 4 million, mainly women, garment workers in Bangladesh. A shadow of fear and intimidation has fallen over the nation’s 3,500 export garment factories, undermining the ongoing process to establish factory health and safety committees that have genuine, active participation by workers.
International clothing brands have tremendous influence in Bangladesh because of the $26 billion in apparel exports they ordered…
cmonforton | January 18, 2017There’s a thriving garment industry in Los Angeles which specializes in small volume production. The employers, who supply the trendy casual sportswear for companies such as Forever 21, Charlotte Russe, Papaya, and Wet Seal, employ about 45,000 workers in Los Angeles. A survey of more than 300 of those workers describes the dirty, dangerous and unhealthy conditions of their jobs. The survey results and companion findings from focus groups are reported in Dirty Threads, Dangerous Factories: Health and Safety in Los Angeles’ Fashion Industry.
Nearly 72 percent of the workers indicated that…
kkrisberg | December 20, 2016At the Center for Public Integrity, Jim Morris reports on working conditions at the nation’s oil refineries, writing that more than 500 refinery incidents have been reported to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency since 1994, calling into question the adequacy of EPA and federal labor rules designed to protect workers as well as the public. Morris begins the story with John Moore, who in 2010 was working at a Tesoro Corporation oil refinery north of Seattle — he writes:
Up the hill from Moore, in the Naphtha Hydrotreater unit, seven workers were restoring to service a bank of heat…
garrettbrown | November 29, 2016A new report by four leading workers’ rights group shows just how hard it is to get international clothing brands to fix problems in their global supply chains despite the fact that 1,100 workers were killed in an instant in an unsafe garment factory in Bangladesh.
Three and a half years after the Rana Plaza building collapsed in Dhaka, Bangladesh, five major clothing brands – Walmart, Gap, VF, Target and Hudson’s Bay – were found to have continuing hazards and dangerous delays in fixing them. What’s worse is that one of the three international inspection programs in Bangladesh – the…
garrettbrown | November 9, 2016By Garrett Brown and Bob Jeffcott
A group of brave women’s rights and labor activists in San Pedro Sula, Honduras were the recipients of the 2016 International Award of the Occupational Health and Safety Section of the American Public Health Association (APHA). The distinction was formally announced at the association's annual meeting. Lynda Yanz, Executive Director of the Maquila Solidarity Network, based in Toronto, Canada, traveled to Denver, Colorado to accept the award on behalf of the Honduras Independent Monitoring Team (EMIH) at the November 1st awards luncheon.
EMIH team (L to R):…
kkrisberg | December 22, 2015At the Center for Public Integrity, reporters Jim Morris and Maryam Jameel investigate the nation’s “third wave” of asbestos-related disease. The story begins with two photos of Kris Penny, who used to install fiber-optic cable beneath the streets of Florida.
The first photo is of Penny in April 2015, looking healthy and happy. The next photo is one taken just six months later. Penny looks dramatically transformed after being diagnosed with peritoneal mesothelioma, a rare cancer of the abdominal lining that’s nearly always related to asbestos exposure. After talking with a lawyer, Penny…
kkrisberg | June 2, 2015Family-friendly policies in the workplace are a good thing, but as Claire Cain Miller writes in The New York Times, there’s also a risk that such policies end up hurting the very workers they’re intended to help.
Miller starts off her piece with international examples of family-friendly policies, such as a law in Chile that requires employers provide child care for working mothers and a policy in Spain that gives the parents of young children the option of working part time. The unintended results of each example? All women — whether they have children or not — get paid less and face fewer…
egrossman | December 16, 2010by Elizabeth Grossman
In an incident that brings to mind the Triangle factory fire that took place in New York almost 100 years ago, the fire that broke out on December 14th on the 9th and 10th floors of the building housing the Ha-meem Group's "That's It Sportswear" factory in the Ashalia industrial district outside Dhaka, Bangladesh killed at least two dozen workers, and injured scores more. Electrical short-circuiting is a primary cause being investigated for the fire that occurred Tuesday while a reported 200 to 300 of the factory's approximately 5,000 or more workers were on lunch break…