These occur at places important to the content of the demonstration; at the courthouse if protesting a judge’s decision, for example, or the Gestapo headquarters to demand return of the Jewish husbands arrested. See 048.
The garment industry has been a backbone of Bangladesh’s economy. In 2012 Bangladesh had more than 4,000 garment industry factories making clothes for major Western brands such as Walmart and Zara. The garment industry earned the country $12 billion a year – nearly 80% of the country’s total exports.
In the early twentieth century, Kansas was the third largest coal producing state in the United States, with more than 8,000 unionized miners concentrated in the two southwestern counties of Crawford and Cherokee. In January 1920, the Kansas legislature had established a board of compulsory arbitration, known as the Kansas Industrial Court, which banned strikes against unfair labor practices and working conditions.
The Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) is a private company that receives government funding to run prison and detention centers for-profit. The CCA’s immigrant detention centers are notorious for particularly bad living conditions.
After the 2008 home mortgage crisis, and particularly after the 2010-2011 recession, home foreclosure rates skyrocketed. Very few cases received much media attention. Dirma Rodgriguez’s situation is almost unique in that it was featured in local and syndicated newspapers. Due to high-profile actions and support from the Occupy Fights Foreclosure sub-committee within the larger group of Occupy Los Angeles, Dirma’s case reached the level of mainstream consciousness throughout the campaign.
On 1 March 2000, 400 Yale University students rallied to demand that their administration withdraw from the Fair Labor Association (FLA) and join the Workers Rights Consortium (WRC) instead. Both organizations focused on monitoring sweatshop labor and apparel companies overseas to ensure that the workers in these companies receive fair treatment; however, universities across the country began to oppose the FLA and argue that it did not actually monitor the companies properly or ensure good working conditions for employees.
On 28 February 2006 Meher Bhargava, a lawyer and wife of Indian National Congress leader Luv Bhargava, was shot. She was defending her daughter-in-law against the lewd comments of a group of men on the street in Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh, India.
Meher Bhargava was hospitalized, but died on 25 March. The day that she was shot, Sunny Rawat confessed to the murder but he retracted his statement the following day. It wasn’t until after her death that Congress began to mobilize to demand justice for Bhargava’s murder.
On 1 January 2008, Mexico repealed all tariffs on corn, beans, milk, and sugar imported from north of the border as part of a 14-year phase out provision agreed to under the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Mexican farmers quickly mobilized to voice their opposition, and tried to pressure the government to renegotiate the agricultural provisions of NAFTA, a free trade agreement passed in 1994 that removed most trade barriers between Mexico, Canada, and the United States.
In the fall of 2006, the University of California Berkeley administration began implementing plans to build a new sports training facility that would be adjacent to the current stadium. The new building would provide more sophisticated gym equipment for visiting athletes, more weight rooms, and 911 parking spaces. It would also “retrofit” the seismically unsafe Memorial Stadium (built on a dangerous fault line). All this would make up the new Student-Athlete High Performance Center
In November of 1960, the United States and British governments reached an agreement on the use of the Holy Loch in the Firth of Clyde, Scotland as an overseas base for the US Navy. The governments believed the U.S. military required an overseas nuclear base for refit and crew overturn for its new Polaris missile submarines, built to serve as a deterrent to Soviet military might.
In the fall of 1998, Harvard students began a Living Wage Campaign that would last for almost four years. The Campaign was headed by the Progressive Student Labor Movement (PSLM) and aimed to help all Harvard employees receive a “living wage”. The demands of the LWC were that each Harvard employee (janitors, security guards, cafeteria workers, etc.) receive a wage of $10 per hour or more. Most workers were receiving the minimum wage at the time, which was around $6.50. In 1998 Cambridge, MA, this was not enough to get by individually, let alone to support a family.
Along with many student activists in United States universities in the late 1990’s and early 2000’s, the University of Buffalo Students Against Sweatshops (UBSAS) ran a campaign to pressure their university to join the Workers Rights Consortium (WRC). After years of student protests and demonstrations, the University of Buffalo (UB) announced that they would join WRC and the Fair Labor Association (FLA). The group of student activists feared that their university’s decision to also join the corporate-sponsored FLA would compromise the efforts and aims of workers’ rights groups.
When the University of California at Santa Cruz (UCSC) hired Chancellor Denice Denton in 2004 the transition entailed her earning a salary of $282,000 a year and $600,000 of renovations made on her future house of residence, including a controversial $30,000 dog run. This became a topic of debate; students as well as media critics quickly brought these details to light and demanded accountability for the choices of spending at the University. Under these circumstances, employees at the University began to call attention to the fact that they earned a less than living wage
In 2006, University of Virginia students launched an intensive campaign to raise minimum wages at their institution. Discontented with the minimum $9.37 an hour, these students urged the school’s administration to provide fairer wages, wages that they determined to start at $10.27 an hour.
When Oregonians received notice in 1968 that the Portland General Electric Company (PGE) planned to install a nuclear power plant in Rainier Oregon, concerned citizens began to work within the political structure to prevent the plant from entering the community. Based on the anti-nuclear sentiment in the US at the time, many Oregonians were wary of the environmental repercussions of a nuclear power plant. Many also considered the construction and upkeep of the plant an unwise allocation of state money.
In the early 2000s Citigroup was the world's largest project finance bank, with customers in over 100 countries and territories. Citigroup provided the finances for thousands of projects; some of these projects were deeply damaging to the environment. Citigroup was indirectly related to the Camisea pipeline in Peru as a financial advisor, as well as the Chad-Cameroon pipeline under construction by Exxon, Chevron and numerous central African oil companies.
In the early 1970s, the state of Pennsylvania proposed a plan for building a nuclear power plant in Limerick, PA, to provide power to residents in Montgomery County, PA. Around that time, the Environmental Protection Agency declared that the Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission (PUC) must conduct a study to determine the impact a nuclear power plant would have in the town of Limerick, and the surrounding county.
Indonesia's people, orangutans, and rainforest are threatened by the widespread planting of trees that produce palm oil for making processed food by giant corporations such as General Foods.
In October of 1998, environmental groups organized protests against Home Depot, the world’s largest do-it-yourself hardware and supply store. The protests were in response to the purchasing and selling of old-growth wood (OGW), or wood from endangered, never before forested regions. In part the impetus for this campaign was that Home Depot had not fulfilled a promise made to Rainforest Action Network (RAN) and other environmentalist groups one year prior to stop the selling of OGW.
On 6 April 2006, a group of people dressed as large chickens entered McDonald’s fast food restaurants in seven cities around the United Kingdom. These chickens were a part of Greenpeace’s campaign against McDonald’s use of soya, a soybean plant, to feed its chickens.
Undergraduate students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison founded the Student Labor Action Coalition (SLAC) in 1994 after watching a video in a sociology course about the lockout of 700 workers at A.E. Staley, a sweetener company in Decatur, Illinois. They formed the organization to support the workers’ campaign there, and later spread to university campuses across the country.
During World War I, the New Zealand government seized burial grounds and traditionally valuable land from the Tainui Awhiro people to build an air base and bunker. Ten years after the end of the war, in 1928, the Public Works Act codified the government’s justification for keeping the land.
On 6 August 1996, Argentinean General Fuel Company, also known as Compañía General de Combustibles (CGC), signed a contract with the Ministry of Energy and Mines in Ecuador without consultation of Kichwa natives of Sarayaku. The contract allowed CGC to exploit and explore 200,000 hectares of Block 23.
The League of Communists of Yugoslavia (LCY) wanted to situate Yugoslavia in a balance between the Soviet dominated Eastern Europe and US dominated West. In order to ensure this global placement, Yugoslavians exercised an economic reform program during 1964-65. LCY utilized market mechanisms to overcome stagnation and stimulate economic growth, but employment and a growth in wage disparity ensued instead. Members of the Yugoslavian Student League as well as professors and editors of dissonant magazines established spaces for critique and set the stage for nonviolent
During the fall of 1968, Ayub Khan celebrated his tenth year as president of Pakistan. In honor of this anniversary, he declared his reign as the “Decade of Development,” an action that sparked an outbreak of protests against the state.
Much of Pakistan was already discontent with the Ayub regime. Following the 1965 war with India, Pakistan experienced a huge economic gap. The working classes faced the burden of this disparity.
