This action consists of a representative delegation meeting with the party responsible for a grievance, in order to present grievances or to propose a new policy. Also see the similar method, 015.
Since 1996, a small number of State University of New York (SUNY) students had been urging the university administration to reject contracts with companies that had unfair labor policies. However, by 1999, students had made very little progress and campus stores still sold questionable sweatshop products.
The students’ anti-sweatshop movement began to generate support in the mid 90s, but was most impactful by the end of the decade. Universities and colleges nationwide began investigating where their college merchandise was made and inquiring about the manufacturers’ labor laws. The main target for many universities, including the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, was Nike because of their partnership with the athletic teams. UNC signed a 7.1 million dollar contract with Nike during the summer of 1997, thus committing to Nike products for the duration of their con
In 1997, student activists formed an organization called United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS). Entirely student run, the organization strives to "win victories that set precedents in the struggle for self-determination of working people everywhere, particularly campus workers and garment workers who make collegiate licensed apparel." In an effort to pursue these goals, USAS created another organization in 2000: the Worker Rights Consortium (WRC).
When the San Francisco Bay based Lucky Sewing Co. filed for bankruptcy in May of 1992, they laid off twelve Chinese immigrant women whom they owed $15,000 in back wages. The company’s attorney claimed that they had few assets and there was no money to pay the seamstresses. Lucky Sewing Co. and other garment contractors imposed terrible conditions on workers who were often paid less than the $4.25 minimum wage.
During the Cold War era, Albanians endured the totalitarian rule of Enver Hoxha. When Hoxha died in 1985, Ramiz Alia took over a Communist country with a history of repression and burdened by massive debt, poverty, and widespread underdevelopment. Following the fall of the Berlin Wall and facing mounting pressure from the Albanian populace, Alia instituted modest political reforms in early 1991 and on March 31 held the Albania’s first free and open elections in 60 years.
In May 2007, Burundian President Pierre Nkurunziza announced a 34 percent salary increase for all civil servants in Burundi. This increase, which the government was to implement in July 2007, followed a year after the government had more than doubled the salaries of military and security personnel. Despite President Nkurunziza’s promise, the International Monetary Fund, which provided much of the international aid to Burundi, urged against the salary increase. Citing lack of funds, by September 2007 the government had still not implemented the 34 percent increase while Nku
In Sri Lanka, elephants are both a valued part of traditional culture and an increasing risk to the populace. A spike in population on the Sri Lankan island has led the government to open lands traditionally reserved for the elephants to settlement by people. Narrowing habitats mean that encounters between elephants and people are more and more common, posing a threat to both elephants and humans. Since 1990, the number of elephants residing in Sri Lanka has fallen from about 12,000 to approximately 4,000, the result of hunting and dwindling food sources.
The United States government established, by treaty, the Bad River Reservation in Ashland County, Wisconsin, in 1854. The treaty allowed members of the Chippewa tribe to retain their rights to hunt and gather food in this area. In 1995, the Copper Range Mining Company decided to use a technique called solution mining to mine copper. Solution mining by the Copper Range Mining Company and Inmet, another mining company, required that large shipments of sulfuric acid be transported to the mines on railroad tracks that intersected with the reservation. Members of the Chip
Workers in the British colony of Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, bore an increased workload to support the war effort during WWII. As extraction of mineral resources increased, employees of Rhodesia Railways worked upward of 65 hours per week to transport the minerals to ports on the Indian Ocean. While white European railway workers had strong unions representing them, black African employees received inferior treatment and lower pay grades than whites.
In September of 1995, international negotiations began on a draft agreement called the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI). The document was being negotiated by members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). The stated goals of the agreement were to establish a set of multilateral rules for foreign investment that would govern the process in a more structured, systematic way. Up until the draft, foreign investment agreements were established on a country-by-country bilateral basis.
In December 1936, autoworkers at General Motors' (GM) plants across Michigan staged multiple sit-down strikes, the longest of which lasted 44 days. The workers originally demanded that GM recognize their union, the United Autoworkers of America (UAW) as the sole bargaining agent for all GM employees. The autoworkers also demanded that GM end all discriminatory practices against its workers and relax efforts to speed up production.
East Timor, a portion of the Indonesian archipelago, was colonized by Portugal in the 16th century. It was not until 1975 that Portugal decolonized the area, at which point East Timor declared independence. Shortly after this, however, the Indonesian army, under the orders of Indonesian President Suharto, invaded and annexed East Timor. 60,000 East Timorese were killed or died of starvation during the invasion.
In 2004 the Azerbaijan government issued a presidential decree stating that students planning to attend universities would have to take a test through the State Commission for Students’ Admission. According to this decree, students could only be legally admitted to a university based on this test and not on any other. However, that year Independent Azerbaijan University (IAU), a private university in the city of Baku, admitted 1,700 students who had not taken the state-sanctioned test. Two years later, in the spring of 2006, the Azerbaijan Ministry of Education announced t
General Moussa Traoré obtained power in Mali in 1968 when he led a military coup d’etat that overthrew the left-leaning nationalist government that had ruled since 1960. Opposition towards Traoré grew during the 1980s, but didn’t fully emerge until the 1990s. During this time, Traoré imposed programs to satisfy demands of the International Monetary Fund, which brought increased hardship upon the country’s population while elites lived in luxury.
The Togolese President Gnassingbé Eyadema came to power in 1967 after he led the army in a bloodless coup to take over the previously multi-party government. By 1990, Eyadema had been president for 23 years and had banned all political parties except for his Rally of the Togolese People. President Eyadema had been able to keep the country’s economy relatively stable at the same time as he put many of his Kabye tribe members into top government and military posts. Nearly 70% of all members of the military were from the Kabye tribe, despite the fact that the Ewe tribe repres
Benin gained its independence from France in 1960 and was then named Dahomey. Colonel Mathieu Kérékou took power of the country in a coup in 1972 and later renamed the country the People’s Republic of Benin, organized the economy under a Marxist-Leninist ideology, and outlawed all political parties except his People’s Revolutionary Party of Benin. By the 1980s, Kérékou remained as the president of Benin, but the economy was failing. The government had to lower government aid to students and the salaries for civil servants and in 1988 the state owned banks crashed. Fa
Turks and Caicos is a British Territory of 8 islands in the Caribbean with a formal population of approximately 15,000, mostly descendants of African slaves. England appoints a Governor to the island for a minimum of three years, but the islands also have their own local government, a legislative council of 13 ministers. Because of their geographic location, the islands are a convenient stop in drug smuggling to the United States. The drug trade through the Islands climaxed in 1985, when U.S. authorities caught a native official bringing drugs to the United States.
Between early February and late March of 2003 labor unions representing civil servants protested against the Bissau-Guinean government for its failure to pay its workers and for the arrest of several prominent opposition figures that criticized the government.
Starting in 2001, rebels supporting the leader François Bozize attempted coups to overthrow President Ange-Félix Patassé in Bangui, the capital of the Central African Republic. The political unrest during this time resulted in a drop of the country’s economy. The government fell behind in payments to many civil servants, such as teachers, and made a priority of paying soldiers to fight the rebels. The teachers demanded that the government pay them nine months of their salaries from the total of twenty-three months in arrears.
In April of 1899, employees of the Niagara Silver Company organized a new union branch: The Metal Polishers, Buffers, Platers, and Brassworkers' International Union of North America, Local No. 155. About 100 workers of the company were part of the union, with fellow employee George Furniss as President. W. A. Jameson, manager of the Niagara Steel Company, appeared before his employees on May 19 and advised against membership in the union.
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
By 1989, Bulgaria’s Communist Party Leader Todor Zhivkov had ruled the country for 35 years through a constitutionally sanctioned single-party government. Zhivkov and the communist Politburo had always quickly repressed any opposition and independent unions or organizations were illegal in the country. In the late 1980s Zhivkov and his regime had also begun an assimilation program for Muslims and ethnic Turks, which had forced nearly 300,000 Turks to leave Bulgaria in 1989 to avoid persecution. At the same time, however, reforms were sweeping through Eastern Europe as prot
Between July 2007 and June 2010, workers of LIAT Airlines, which is based in Antigua and Barbuda, protested against their employers for better wages and holiday pay. The campaign was a back and forth struggle between LIAT Airlines and multiple Caribbean governments on one side, and the flight attendants and pilots of LIAT Airlines on the other. The employees relied mainly on strikes and sick-ins throughout the campaign whenever the authorities did not meet their demands.
Wallis and Futuna is an overseas department of France situated in the Pacific, 225 miles west of Samoa and 300 miles northeast of Fiji. The islands’ population stands at around 15,000 people. Between February and June of 1994, the Force Ouvrière union on Wallis and Futuna organized strikes for a variety of demands chiefly dealing with the high cost of living and the lack of a public educational option in primary school.
The Brisbane tramways, located in Queensland, Australia, were owned by General Electric Company, a private British company. Joseph Stillman Badger, an American, was its manager. He refused to allow the formation of any industrial union among the company employees. In other parts of Australia, tramway employees in Melbourne and Adelaide faced similar opposition and they were forbidden to wear any sign of membership of the union. The higher authority claimed the wearing of badges by unionists would intimidate the non-badge-wearers.
