Browse Cases

In February of 1999, members of the Progressive Activist Network (PAN) at Penn joined with United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS) chapters at other Ivy League universities in an anti-sweatshop campaign by sending a joint letter to their university presidents. The letter requested a response by March 8, 1999, from University President Judith Rodin and seven other Ivy League university presidents, (excluding Dartmouth’s,) to four demands regarding the possible use of sweatshops in school-insignia apparel production.

In 1960 and 1961, the Washington, D.C., area experienced an increase in diplomatic representatives from Africa, causing tension and emphasizing the issue of segregation in the area. Visiting African diplomats were exposed to segregation in many restaurants, facilities, and other public accommodations, particularly along Route 40 - a primary means of travel between the embassies in Washington D.C. and the United Nations headquarters in New York - where nearly all of the restaurants and facilities were only open to white customers.

Since the late 1960’s, companies have been cutting down trees in the virgin forests of Malaysia, most notably in the state of Sarawak.  Environmentalists all over the world were concerned about the effects of deforestation on the native Penan people and the effects of logging on the rich biodiversity of the rainforests.  In particular, environmentalists in neighboring Australia wished to raise awareness about the issue and provide aid to the Penan people.  These environmentalists formed the Rainforest Action Groups (RAG), one in each of three Australian cities, Sydney, Melbou

Since the fall of the Ottoman Empire in 1922, Turkey has technically been a secular democracy.  Despite this, it has experienced numerous coups and the government has at times proven itself to be highly corrupt.

In June of 2004, police arrested twenty-three businessmen in the Uzbek city of Andijan for their supposed connection to Akramia, an Islamic extremist group.  These businessmen enjoyed considerable support among the Andijan population, because they employed many locals at higher wages than other companies did.  The national government, however, saw these businessmen as a nuisance.  After the 1999 Tashkent bombings, the Uzbek government cracked down on Muslims, and made it much harder for Muslims to have their own businesses.  The twenty-three Muslim businessmen in Andijan

Three men sentenced to death in Ohio staged a twelve-day hunger strike in January 2011 with the goal of gaining the same living conditions as the 100 other prisoners on Ohio's Death Row.  The men, Keith Lamar, Jason Robb, and Carlos Sanders were sentenced to death for their roles in the 1993 Lucasville Uprising, the deadly and longest-lasting prison revolt in United States history.  For the last seventeen years, the three men, along with James Were, who was also involved in the Uprising, had been held in 23-hour-a-day solitary confinement.  They had been barred from access to

The Pakistan that gained independence from the British Empire in 1947 was a strange and ultimately ill-fated state.  The country included two geographically disparate regions, West and East Pakistan (modern-day Bangladesh), separated by nearly one thousand miles of Indian territory.  Throughout the military regimes of the 1950s and 60s, Bengali needs were neglected to benefit the “22 families,” all West Pakistani, who controlled the country’s economy.  A movement for East Pakistani autonomy emerged from this climate, led by Sheikh Mujibur Rahman (known popularly as Mujib).&nb

From late June to early September 1989, nearly 2,000 Turkish prisoners underwent a hunger strike. They protested against an August 1988 decree that instituted very harsh measures within the prison system. The Turkish government imposed the decree after 47 prisoners had escaped. Additionally, in June 1989, prison officials found two unfinished escape tunnels and, as a result, imposed even harsher measures.

During the first decades of the 20th century, Spain saw the rise of several radical left and right groups that continually vied for power against the largely ineffectual civilian government.
On the left the groups included the socialist Unión General de Trabajadores (UGT) and its more radical rival the anarcho-syndicalist Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT).

The Massachusetts Bay Colony of the New World was a Puritan theocratic state in the early 1650s. Puritan leaders did not have much tolerance for people of other religions, and as a result, the Puritan government often persecuted and banished religious outsiders who tried to enter and live in their Puritan towns. A fear was embedded in the Puritan society that if they started to admit outsiders, they would lose their political and religious control of the colony.

From the late 19th century into the early 20th century, Ecuador’s labor movement was slowly growing. However, most workers’ organizations consisted of groups of artisans, rather than industrial workers. These mutual aid societies collected dues mainly to pay for funerals of members who passed away and to financially help the family of the deceased. Additionally, some started night schools and reading groups. They also received most of their funding from the government, which helped keep their actions and goals moderate.

The Dutch and British colonization of South Africa in the 17th and 18th centuries brought a system of segregation to the region that remained in place well into the twentieth century. From 1948 to 1994 this took the form of apartheid, a system of legal racial segregation that ensured the continued rule of the country by the white minority.

The Seattle General Strike was the first general strike in the U.S. and marked the beginning of a post-WWI era of labor conflict.

The 13 English colonies in North America were established and grew during the 17th and 18th centuries. During most of this time, the colonists lived under what historians have termed “salutary neglect,” meaning that the English government mostly left them alone and the colonies prospered under these conditions.

During a period of five months in the spring of 1960, students and adults in Charlotte, North Carolina, participated in the sit-in movement to protest segregation. It was an attempt to end racial segregation in the public facilities in the city of Charlotte. The city government was the opposition.

The Basotho Congress Party came into power in the democratic elections of 1993. Lesotho, a kingdom, possessed a system of government that was characterized by the presence of both a monarch and elected officials. The monarch at the time of the elections, King Letsie III, made an attempt to persuade the newly elected BCP government to reinstate his father, King Moshoeshoe II, as king. King Moshoeshoe had previously been exiled for trying to amend the constitution to allocate more power to the throne.

University of North Carolina (UNC) Sierra Student Coalition members and students created the Coal-Free UNC movement in an effort to end the University’s use of coal and close the on-campus coal plant.  Its goal is to eliminate coal on campus by 2015.  Coal-Free UNC also wanted the University to adhere to its green initiative EXPLAIN.  The Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal national campaign to end dependence on coal and its use on campus, while encouraging the use of renewable sources of energy inspired UNC’s campaign.  

In the late nineteenth century, the Argentinian working class had gained greater self-identification during the economic crisis of 1898–1904, when labor strikes – an unknown phenomenon up to then – unleashed the rapid expansion of labor organizing and labor unions, and the national FORA (Regional Argentinian Workers' Federation) was created. In the first decade of the 20th century, union actions were met with extreme repression by the state, which proved incapable of responding through conciliation, leading to general strikes in 1902, 1904, and 1906.

Curacao is an island country in the southern Caribbean Sea, near the Venezuelan coast.  Part of the Dutch Antilles, the country of about 150,000 was formerly a Dutch colony.  In a shift away from colonialism, the islands of the Antilles were given a degree of self-government while still linked together as a unit under the Netherlands.

Historically, hartals have been a common form of resistance in Bangladesh, although there was a three-year period without hartals from 2007-2010. On May 19, 2010, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, the main Bangladeshi opposition party, held a rally, where party leader Khaleda Zia announced a nationwide hartal for June 27, in opposition to the Awami League, the ruling party. She also announced that there would be many sit-ins and rallies nationwide leading up to the hartal.

Following a breakdown in negotiations over a collective bargaining agreement, severance pay, and job security, over 100 employees of Air Vanuatu went on strike on August 22, 2005. Workers in Port Vila and Luganville stopped working at 4:30 am, forcing the small airline to cancel all its domestic and international flights. The workers demanded arbitration of their grievances as a condition for ending the strike.

The anti-sweatshop movement was the largest student activism movement in the United States since the South African divestment movement over ten years before. Students all around the country pressured college and university administrators to adopt strict labor codes that guaranteed that merchandise bearing the college’s logo was not made by people working under unacceptable, “sweatshop-like” conditions.

On April 3, 1963, several black integrationists belonging to the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights (ACMHR) entered the Briling Cafeteria in Birmingham and sat at the white’s only lunch counter to request service. When they were refused service, these members staged a sit-in. The ACMHR had struggled to desegregate the lunch counter and bring about equal employment opportunities in all sectors for black citizens in Birmingham for seven long years.

In Greensboro, North Carolina in 1960, Jim Crow laws were in widespread effect. Though the African-American Civil Rights Movement had led to some successful desegregation (notably within the school system thanks to Brown v. Board and Swann v. Charlotte), “separate but equal” was still the norm with respect to the vast majority of businesses in Greensboro, and the rest of the South.

The Service Employees International Union (SEIU) formed the Local 399 shortly after World War II. The Local 399 was a labor union for janitors which had reached its peak in the 1970s, but was struggling in the 1980s. During this time, the Local 399 fought for higher wages for its members, which motivated cleaning contractors to invest in nonunion options. The cleaning industry was extremely competitive at the time and as a result of this emphasis on nonunion cleaners, membership in the Local 399 had fallen from approximately 5,000 members to only 1,800.