All the workers employed by a company no matter where their work site is, or what the nature of their job is.
By the early 1990s, President Hastings Kamuzu Banda of the
Malawi Congress Party (MCP) had been president of Malawi for thirty years, ever
since the country transitioned out of colonial rule. At the time, Malawi was a
single-party state in which political parties were illegal.
On February 12, 1968, sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee, began a labor strike to protest unfair wages, unsafe working conditions, and the city’s refusal to recognize their sanitation workers union.
In the latter part of the nineteenth century Norway was marginal in Europe, a part of the Swedish kingdom, with a scarcity of resources, little industrial development, and massive poverty. Although the country had parliamentary forms, it was ruled by the owning class; the Norwegian army was used to suppress strikes.
In order to strengthen their hold on political and economic power, the white settlers of British-controlled Northern Rhodesia sought to unite the British colonial territories of Northern Rhodesia, Southern Rhodesia, and Nyasaland during the late 1930s and 1940s. This was a response to the growing strength of African organizations (e.g.
The October 31, 2004, presidential elections in Ukraine pitted popular opposition candidate Viktor Yushchenko against Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych. The incumbent president, Leonid Kuchma, had personally chosen Yanukovych as his successor, but their political party was losing popular support. Yushchenko, supported by a united opposition, was expected to win the election. However, the October 31 election yielded no winner, with each candidate receiving about 40% of the votes. At this point most opposition groups, such as the student group Pora, already suspected fr
Following a loss in World War I, Germany was charged to pay reparations for their destructive role. The bill was $33 billion. Germany had been weakened by the war and paying the reparations at the rate in which they were due would have completely crippled the country. Germany therefore tried to gain more time to pay. The Germans set forth a proposal for U.S banks to loan funds for the reparations and for France to reevaluate the reparations.
In 1889, workers at the Carnegie Company’s Homestead Works on the Monongahela River southeast of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania forced the company to pay workers according to a sliding scale corresponding to the price of steel. This set up a correlation between wages and the company’s profits. It also officially recognized the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers, or AA, as the representative craft union for the plant and introduced the union as a powerful force in the operation of the plant.
In the wake of economic depression in 1893, George Pullman, Illinois businessman and inventor of the sleeping railway car, sought to cut costs in his company town outside of Chicago. Mr. Pullman fired approximately one third of his workers, and reduced remaining wages by over 25 percent. He refused to decrease housing and food prices in the town.
After Augosto Pinochet took power in 1973, Chile depended increasingly on its copper industry to fuel the country’s export-oriented economy. In the 1990s, the Chilean government allowed for the construction of privately owned mines. One such mine was Escondida, which became the world’s largest copper mine in terms of production. The mine was co-owned by four multinational companies, with BHP Billiton controlling the majority of its shares.
Misr Spinning and Weaving Company is the largest public sector Egyptian textile company, employing 27,000 workers in the mid-2000s. The company is located in the Nile Delta town Mahalla al-Kubra and had a history of workers protests, the most significant of which occurred in December 2006 when about 20,000 of the company’s employees struck (see "Egyptian textile workers strike for bonuses and prrotest corruption, 2006").
Detroit, Michigan had long served as a world center for auto manufacturing. A number of U.S. automobile manufacturers centered their operations in the city, including Ford, Chrysler and General Motors. For decades, as well, the city was a center of racial conflict in the country. Following World War II, a number of white soldiers had returned to Detroit to find their manufacturing jobs “taken” by women and, more so, African American men. A number of Black workers were forced out of their jobs, though many remained.
On March 3, 2006, Egyptian Prime Minister Ahmad Nazif announced that all public-sector manufacturing workers would be given an increase in their annual bonuses. The workers of Mahalla al-Kubra’s Misr Spinning and Weaving Company, the country’s largest public sector textile company employing 27,000 people, were overjoyed at the decree.
In the midst of the depression sweeping the globe during the 1930s, Portugal’s finance minister, António de Oliveira Salazar, established the Estado Novo (the New State), a right-wing, pro-Catholic, corporatist authoritarian regime. Based on “patriotism, paternalism, and prudence,” Salazar promised financial stability and economic growth. By the 1960s, Portugal was enjoying reasonably stable economic growth, but nearly all of that growth was absorbed by either Portugal’s “twenty families” or the regime.
On December 9, 2010, twenty-two employees represented by the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) Canada Local 832 walked off the job and began to strike against their employer Malteurop. Malteurop is the exclusive producer of malt for the Moosehead Brewery along with micro-breweries such as Half-Pints in Winnipeg. Workers went on strike for the purpose of demonstrating to the company that they were serious about their demands for obtaining a fair contract and wanted the company to remove the unnecessary concessions they were demanding of the employees.
In the mid 1950’s hundreds of loggers were employed by the Anglo-Newfoundland Development Company (AND). Many of these workers were employed out of Grand Falls, near the town of Badger, Newfoundland, Canada. These particular workers soon felt that they were not being treated as they should be, and became increasingly frustrated with the low wages and uncomfortable living situations in the bush camps. These camps had cramped, cold, uncomfortable sleeping areas and lacked both showers and heaters for warmth.
Thailand is one of the world's largest exporters of shrimp, with customers all over the globe including the US, Europe and Australia. Walmart's purchases of Thai shrimp provided around 70 percent of the US market.
On 23 January 2012 Keo Ratha, a Cambodian migrant worker at the Phatthana Seafood Factory in Thailand, contacted the Cambodian newspaper Phnom Penh Post to call attention to poor working conditions and broken contractual agreements with the factory and CDM Trading Manpower, the company which recruited hundreds of Cambodians to work at the factory.
Indianola, Mississippi is home to the Delta Pride catfish factory. Although Mississippi is among the poorest states in the US, catfish farming accounts for $350 million a year and is the state's largest agricultural industry. Owned by a cooperative of 400-500 white landowners, massive tracts of land in the Mississippi River Delta are artificially flooded to create ponds conducive to farming and processing catfish. While truck drivers and loaders tend to be African American men, most line workers are African American women, often single heads of households.
Male textile factory workers at El Inca factory in Lima, Peru walked off the job in December of 1918 to protest the effects of a law that enacted an eight-hour workday requirement for women and children. The law was intended to protect the rights of children and particularly women laborers, but instead dissolved the set-up within the factories, slowing production and preventing the remaining male workers from meeting their quotas.
On 29 September 2011 about 1,200 miners at Freeport’s Cerro Verde mining site began a 75-day strike. The participants were scheduled to walk off their jobs at 8:30 am Eastern Time. At midnight on the same day, 8,000 miners at Freeport’s Grasberg mine planned to begin a one month strike. The workers at both of these mines were part of the same miners union, all working towards the same goals.
The strikes began after wage talk attempts had failed. The union’s general secretary said, “Freeport’s offer was insufficient. There was no chance of reaching an agreement”.
The Wal-Mart distribution center in Elwood, Illinois, is one of the five largest in the country. Wal-Mart’s goods are imported here, shipped to smaller centers, and then sent to individual stores. However, many people who worked in the distribution centers were hired through employment contractors and were kept at “temporary” employee status, depriving them of benefits and higher pay, even if they had worked the same job for years. Conditions inside the warehouses were often unsafe and many workers experienced wage theft and discrimination by employers.
In Durban, South Africa, black African workers constituted one of the largest groups of industrial workers in South Africa with 165,000 workers. However, the minimum wage for black African workers was set considerably lower than the Poverty Datum Line.
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 1934 it had been a successful year for strikes in Milwaukee, which emboldened retail clerks at Sears, Roebuck and Company, and the Boston Store to demand higher wages. At the time most clerks earned below $14 a week, which they called “starvation wages.”
During the 1860s and 1870s, workers in Sicily supported each other through mutual aid societies, which claimed the right to strike and to lobby for wage increases. This precedent of organized labor, along with a recent history of peasant uprisings against feudal aristocracy and the spread of socialist ideology, set the stage for the Fasci Siciliani movement.
In the 1920s, the giant automobile corporation General Motors began introducing wage cuts, speeding up its assembly line, and laying off workers at their plant in Oshawa, Ontario. General Motors did not allow workers breaks, and underemployed them at part-time for much of the year. The company fired workers if they complained about conditions.
