When lobbying of a parliamentary representative is done by a collective group of that representative's constituents, the act becomes a form of nonviolent action. Group lobbying differs from deputations in that it is generally directed towards elected governmental officials. Also see the similar method, 015.
In 2009, Hartmarx Corporation workers fought to maintain their company and prevent liquidation. Legal and financial actions were taken in this fight. The course of nonviolent action that Hartmarx employees carried out only took place over a month. Hartmarx sought to convince Wells Fargo Bank, the company’s main creditor, to approve the sale of Hartmarx to a suitable buyer that would keep the company in business.
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.
The Ogoni region is a highly oil-rich area in the Niger Delta area of Nigeria, populated by approximately 500,000 members of the Ogoni People. Since the Shell Petroleum Development Company discovered oil in Ogoniland in 1958, the region has been plagued with serious environmental degradation resulting from the over 100 oil wells in the area.
In the 1980’s the Bhutanese government saw the Lhotshampa people, natives of Southern Bhutan, as a political threat. The government began to discriminate against them, and in the early 1990’s, 100,000 people from Southern Bhutan fled their country, fearing for their safety. The Bhutan refugees resided in United Nations-sponsored refugee camps in Nepal.
In El Salvador in 1998, the Inter-American Development Bank, a branch of the World Bank, approved a loan for a reform program directed at the nation’s water sector. The loan focused on a program based on decentralization and privatization of El Salvador’s water systems. 36 million dollars of the loan was designated specifically for the promotion of private sector participation in the decentralization program.
In 2002, El Salvador was under intense pressure from the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank to privatize its healthcare system, which had up until that point been controlled by the government and available to all legally employed Salvadorans. The system, while admittedly seriously lacking in the services that it provided to the typical Salvadoran, had shown marked improvements over the past few years. A widely popular 1999 strike by the ISSS, the healthcare workers union, had prevented the country from privatizing healthcare and since that point services had graduall
After the United States dropped the first atomic weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the initial shock of the weapons’ destructive power wore off, many countries became interested in developing electricity based off of the nuclear technology. Along with the exciting new possibilities that always accompany new technology, nuclear fission carried with it a whole host of dangerous challenges as well.
Prior to Iran’s revolution in 1979, women gained many rights that were retracted after the revolution concluded. Campaigns for women’s rights since the revolution have not sought additional rights, but wished to maintain the rights women had already earned. One such campaign was the One Million Signatures campaign, which aimed to persuade the Majles (parliament) to reform gender-discriminatory laws. The campaign also looked to educate citizens, and particularly women, about the negative impact of these laws on the lives of women and society as a whole.
The Klamath was one of the largest and most important rivers in the American northwest, running through Oregon and California. It was home to four Native American tribes and many fishermen and provided irrigation water for nearby farmers. Between 1902 and 1962, energy producing PacifiCorp constructed five dams on the Klamath for hydropower purposes. Although PacifiCorp has turned a consistent profit since then, the environmental damage caused by the dams has been enormous.
Across much of the world during the mid-1980s, students on university campuses led boycott, divestment, and other solidarity campaigns targeting the apartheid government of South Africa. This solidarity movement played a fundamental role in the ultimate dismantling of the apartheid state, spawning institutional and governmental pressure beyond just educational institutions. This student-catalyzed movement emerged around 1985, and by 1990, with the release of Nelson Mandela, most of the groups' campaigns were successful.
In the early 1990s the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY) was a confederation made up of six constituent republics: Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Macedonia, Montenegro, and Serbia. However, the ethnic groups from each of these regions were spread throughout the SFRY, which blurred the borders between the constituent republics and made politics in each region much more complicated. For instance, Bosnia-Herzegovina was 44% Bosnian Muslims, 31% Serbs, and 17% Croats. In order to provide federal representation to each constituent republic, the leadership
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.
Through the 1830s, the Cherokee owned incredibly rich, fertile land that was desired by their white neighbors. In 1828, gold was discovered in Cherokee nation, setting off the Georgia gold rush. Though the Cherokee had been resisting social forces trying to displace them, legal pressure began to mount to allow access to the land and to remove the Cherokee from it. In 1830 President Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act, forcing the Cherokee in Georgia and other areas east of the Mississippi River to relocate to other Indian lands in the West, primarily in Oklahoma.
Seeking extra tax revenue to bolster a struggling state budget, the United States state of Pennsylvania passed a bill in 2004 authorizing casinos in the state. The bill, Act 71, legalized the construction of 15 new casinos in the state, two of which would be chosen from among five proposals in the city of Philadelphia. The location, size, management, and other details remained open-ended. As the permitting process began, Philadelphia community members voiced concern to the Pennsylvania Gaming Control Board (PGCB) about the intrusion of casinos into their neighborhoods.
In 2009, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) began to take action against Sodexo, a multinational food services corporation, with the intent of improving wages and other conditions for Sodexo employees. A year later, the SEIU began to reach out to students on college campuses across the United States. A campaign on the campus of Tulane University started to organize in March of 2010.
“I have decided to quit as president.”- Indonesian President Suharto, 21st May 1998
These words echoed across Indonesia, as students who had been occupying parliament for the past three days fell to their knees; while others cheered around television sets watching their president, in power for the past thirty years, resign.
In January 2010, it became clear that the Jamaican government sought to sell Air Jamaica to a foreign company. The government and the owners of Air Jamaica saw the company as losing a lot of money and, due to heavy subsidizing, the government had a great deal of power over the future of the airline. Some reports suggest that Air Jamaica was losing more than USD $90 million per year and was already USD $900 million in debt. However, Air Jamaica employed over 1,600 Jamaicans. Fearing for the loss of their jobs and the potential damage that could be done to the country
In 2000, Liberia’s second civil war broke out. Liberian President Charles Taylor and his military forces, who had taken over Liberia in 1989 during the first civil war, experienced attacks from the Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy (LURD). LURD consisted of various anti-Taylor militant groups led by warlords who were not given a role in Taylor's government.
Luis Fortuño was elected Governor of Puerto Rico and sworn in on January 2, 2009. Two months into his term, Fortuño announced his plan to repair Puerto Rico’s struggling economy. He called for severe budget cuts, which some speculated would result in the laying off of over 30,000 government employees. Fortuño’s economic plan would be met with much resistance from workers, teachers, and students. In May, workers organized a march to San Juan in protest against the plans. In October, workers organized a general strike to protest these same budget cuts.
In December 1950, the municipal authorities in Barcelona increased the cost of tram fare by 40%. Working class families were outraged. The cost of living had been rising and the price of food was at an all-time high. On February 8, 1951, an anonymous leaflet circulated throughout Barcelona, calling for a boycott of the city’s trams to begin on March 1 until the fares were returned to their regular price. As the date of the boycott approached, citizens from across the city began to make their anger known. On February 22, groups of individuals united in protest a
French-occupied Syria was facing darkening hopes for more independence from France at the end of 1935. The major Syrian nationalist party, the National Bloc, was losing power, the Syrian Parliament was adjourned and the government in power was under the unpopular Shaikh Taj al-Din al-Hasani. France was also refusing to negotiate a new treaty with Syria. In a move to squash the National Bloc altogether, the French authorities closed the office of the National Bloc in Damascus on January 20, 1936, and arrested two leaders from the Bloc: Fakhri al-Barudi and Sayf al-Din al-Ma’min.
In 2003, the Domestic Relations Bill (DRB) was reintroduced to the Ugandan Parliament after being dormant for nearly forty years. It was revived largely because of strong encouragement from groups like the Uganda Human Rights Commission that were looking to improve conditions for women and families in Uganda. Women’s activists like those of the Uganda Women’s Network saw the bill’s potential to eliminate traditional practices like female genital mutilation, bride price, and widow inheritance.
In July 1975, the Dahe Dam on the Dahe River in Shanyang Township, southern China, was completed. The environmental toll of the project accumulated within months. Upstream of the dam, rising waters swamped homes and farmland, while downstream, water coming from the spillways scoured away riverbank, causing widespread erosion and loss of fertile land. The government anticipated a certain amount of upstream flooding, and accordingly compensated the affected population and relocated them when necessary. In the haste to complete the project, however, the engineers had ne
