Local Government in India Bans Coke and Pepsi

August 16, 2006

The state government of the south Indian state of Kerala has banned the production and sale of Coca-Cola and Pepsi in the state, according to the India Resource center August 9, 2006. The companies will be asked to close their operations.

"We have arrived at the decision to ask both Coke and Pepsi to stop production and distribution of all their products, based on scientific studies which have proved that they are harmful," said Chief Minister V. S. Achuthanandan. The Chief Minister cited a four year campaign of community protests in Plachimada in Kerala. The community has protested falling water levels and pollution of the groundwater and soil. As a result of community opposition, the Coca-Cola bottling plant in Plachimada shut down in March 2004.

In addition, the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE), a research and advocacy group in India, recently released a study finding that Coca-Cola and Pepsi products tested in India contained pesticide residues twenty-four times higher than the amount allowed by European Union (EU) standards.

The Supreme Court of India has also ordered Coca-Cola and Pepsico to reveal the ingredients in their products in six weeks, or risk a national ban of their products.

Coca-Cola and Pepsi have now been banned in government and educational institutions by many states in India, including Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Karnataka, Chattisgarh, Andhra Pradesh, Gujarat, and Delhi.

Andrew Young Faces Critics for Backing Wal-Mart

April 25, 2006

World Monitors reports the following: The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports April 25 that the Reverend Joseph Lowery and dozens of other civil rights and religious leaders are signing a letter that condemns former US Ambassador to the United Nations Andrew Young for his work defending Wal-Mart Stores Inc.

The letter says Wal-Mart has a "history of breaking child labor laws" and engages in "unethical" business practices. The company now is using Young "to try to turn our eyes from the truth," it says. Young, in his own letter to church officials released April 24, praised Wal-Mart for allowing poor people to be able to buy "low-cost fruits, vegetables, vitamins, medicines and clothing."

Since February, Young has been serving as chairman of the steering committee for Working Families for Wal-Mart, a group that defends Wal-Mart's business practices.

The letter invokes the name of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., the revered civil rights leader who worked closely with Young during the height of the movement in the 1960s.

"Dr. King would have disagreed with Mr. Young on this issue - King sided with the poor," says a passage from the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago. "Young is taking a stand against the poor and is siding with the filthy rich who are oppressing the poor."

Young himself is a minister with the United Church of Christ, whose officials initiated the letter, according to Ron Stief, who heads the church's Justice and Witness Ministries. The church cannot order Young to change his position on Wal-Mart. Stief said the purpose of both the private and public letters is to ask Young: "What are you doing defending a company that has done more to hurt working people than any other company?"

EFJ Finishes 6th National Speaking Tour

April 25, 2006

EFJ co-directors Kretzu and Keady finished up their 6th National Speaking Tour this month. During the last school year, they gave 46 lectures at colleges and high schools around the country, including a few lectures at conferences and churches. In the past 6 years, they have visited more than 250 schools and communities in 33 states, speaking to more than 50,000 people. If you are interested in booking an event for the Fall 2006 semester, please e-mail: Leslie@educatingforjustice.org.

Designated Suppliers Program Campaign

April 20, 2006

The United Students Against Sweatshops launched a new campaign recently that would require universities to use certain "approved" factories from which to get their bookstore apparel and, in the future, apparel for their athletes. Fourteen universities have expressed supprt for the Designated Suppliers Program. They are Duke University, Indiana University, University of Wisconsin-Madison, University of Connecticut, Syracuse University, Cornell University, Santa Clara University, University of Maine-Farmington, Smith College, SUNY Albany, Columbia University, Grand Valley State University and Hamilton College. For more information, and to learn how to involve your university, visit: http://studentsagainstsweatshops.org/campaigns/sweatfree_main.php

Governors' Coalition for Sweatfree Procurement

April 20, 2006

Governors' Coalition for Sweatfree Procurement and Worker Rights proposed by Maine's Governor John Baldacci seeks to use state government procurement of apparel, such as firefighter, police and janitorial uniforms, to create a market for goods made in humane conditions by workers who earn good wages. When states come together they can pool resources for enforcement of sweatfree procurement laws and consolidate purchasing power to reward sweatfree factories. For more information, visit: http://www.sweatfree.org/governorscoalition.

USAS Launches New Website

March 11, 2006

United Students Against Sweatshops recently unveiled FLA WATCH, a new webite documenting the ineffectiveness of corporate monitoring done by the Fair Labor Association (FLA). The FLA purports to be an "independent" monitor of working conditions in the apparel industry. But the organization is funded and controlled by the very corporations that have been repeatedly found to be sweatshop violators. Congrats to USAS on this important step towards truly independent monitoring in factories abroad.

SweatFree Communities Conference - April 2006

February 28, 2006

The first international SweatFree Communities conference will be held April 7-9, 2006 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. SweatFree Communities is a nonprofit organization that supports and coordinates campaigns for public and religious institutions to adopt sweatfree procurement policies that end public support for sweatshops and generate significant market demand for products made in humane conditions by workers who are paid living wages.

The conference will emphasize nuts and bolts organizing skills, while promoting new city, state, and school coalitions to consolidate procurement power and coordinate enforcement of sweatfree policies. Highlights will include sessions on marketing sweatshop-free products, immigrant working conditions in the U.S. laundry and garment industries, and a special presentation for elected officials and procurement staff. One conference track will be designed by and for youth to learn how to organize for sweatfree schools. For more information, visit SweatFree Communities.

Sweat-free, Fair Trade and Socially Responsible Gifts

December 5, 2005

When you need to buy a gift, and want that present to reflect your values, here are a few options:

Remembering Rosa Parks - (1913-2005)

December 1, 2005

On December 1st of this year, it will be 50 years from the day that Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white man on a segregated Montgomery, Alabama bus. People who are 41 years of age and older were alive when black people were forced to drink from separate water fountains, enter back doors of public buildings, and give up their seats to white people who were considered superior by the laws of the United States of America.

Unlike how she is portrayed in the media, Rosa Parks’ decision of nonviolent civil disobedience was not “out-of-the-blue” and the Montgomery Bus Boycott which followed Rosa Parks’ stand was not simply spontaneous. Rosa Parks and her husband had worked hard alongside other community activists in the local NAACP chapter. They were waiting for the right time to launch what became the Montgomery Bus Boycott campaign. One of the best ways that we can honor Rosa Parks’ legacy is by acknowledging that hard, dedicated, tireless work is necessary in order to create social change.

Another way to honor Rosa Parks' legacy is to visit the Southern Poverty Law Center's web-based resource “101 Tools for Tolerance.” You will find easy, concrete actions that you can take at your school, your church, your community, your workplace or your home to promote tolerance and conquer hate in our world today. Choose 5 things that you will do as an active remembrance of Rosa Parks, then e-mail the website to 5 of your friends and ask that they do the same.

Wal-Mart Under Fire

October 25, 2005

In the last few months, Wal-Mart has been sued for violating workers rights, has had a memo leaked showing a concerted effort to take away employee benefits and has been given special treatment by the U.S. Department of Labor on regulating child labor. A new film by Robert Greenwald (Producer/Director of Outfoxed) has exposed all of these violations and more. Read more>

Recently, the National Labor Committee and China Labor Watch jointly released two devastating reports on Wal-mart supplier factories in South China. The reports found that workers are forced to work 15 to 19 hours a day, from 7:30AM to 10:30PM, or even until 3:00AM., seven days a week. For more information, click here.

EFJ Now Booking Spring 2006/ Fall 2006 Events

October 15, 2005

Educating for Justice is now booking Traveling Classroom events for the current academic year. EFJ Co-Directors have delivered multimedia presentations on a range of topics at more than 250 universities & high schools, to 50,000 people in the last four years. For more information on EFJ's presentations, or to book an event click here>

Start an EFJ Chapter at Your School

October 12, 2005

Interested in forming a group at your high school, college or church that shares EFJ's mission of educating and empowering citizens to take action to end social injustice? Interested in affiliating your existing group with Educating for Justice? You organize the people, we'll provide the materials. Let us know>

Bill To Clean Up Olympic Sportswear introduced in US Congress

August 02, 2005

On August 2, Oxfam America and the AFL-CIO, the US trade union confederation, expressed their support for H.R. 4988, the “Play Fair at the Olympics Act,” introduced in the House of Representatives by Jan Schakowsky, senior Democrat on the Commerce, Trade and Consumer Protection Subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, and George Miller, senior Democrat on the Education and the Workforce Committee.

The “Play Fair at the Olympics Act” would instruct the United States Olympic Committee (USOC) to require companies that obtain Olympics licenses to observe international labour standards.

“Going for the gold is not always about an athlete trying to win a medal at the Olympics. It’s also about multibillion dollar companies using whatever means necessary to fatten their bottom line, while their workers suffer and have their basic human rights routinely violated,” Schakowsky said. “The Play Fair at the Olympics Bill will level the playing field because workers have finished last in the international labor market for far too long.”

For more information:
http://releases.usnewswire.com/GetRelease.asp?id=125-08022004

For more information on the Play Fair at the Olympics Campaign, visit www.fairolympics.org

VICTORY- Nike Discloses Factories!

April 13, 2005

On April 13th, 2005 Nike issued its 2004 Corporate Responsibility Report admitting to countless abuses that advocates have struggled to bring to light for years. On the same day Nike launched the report, they took a step that activists had been asking for 10 years: they disclosed the names and addresses of each one of their 700+ factories around the world. More>

EFJ Responds to Nike's 2004 Corporate Responsibility Report

April 10, 2005

Over 150 newspapers ran the Associated Press news story about Nike's 2004 Corporate Responsibility Report, which included much of Nike's perspective but very little from critical labor advocates. Read EFJ's Response to Nike's 2004 Corporate Responsibility Report.

Report from Indonesia - Nike workers receive $11 per month

April 6, 2005

On April 6th, 2005 - one week prior to the release of Nike's Corporate Responsibility Report - a well-respected labor rights group in Indonesia reported that workers at a Nike contract factory were paid only 15% of the legal minimum wage, violating both Indonesian labor law and Nike's own Code of Conduct. If a person working in the U.S. were paid 15% of the legal minimum wage ($5.15/hour), it would equal 77 cents / hour or $6.16 / day. Read more>

The Rush to China for Cheap Labor

March 10, 2005

"Free of Quota, China Textiles Flood the U.S."
by David Barboza and Elizabeth Becker
The New York Times

Shanghai, March 9 - In the first month after the end of all quotas on textiles and apparel around the world, imports to the United States from China jumped about 75 percent, according to trade figures released by the Chinese government.

The statistics bear some of the first evidence that China's booming textile and apparel trade, unhampered by quotas, could be prepared to dominate the global textile trade and add to trade tensions around the world. The quotas came to an end on Dec. 31 as a result of an international agreement reached in 1993.

In January, the United States imported more than $1.2 billion in textiles and apparel from China, up from about $701 million a year ago. Imports of major apparel products from China jumped 546 percent. Last January, for example, China shipped 941,000 cotton knit shirts, which were limited by quotas; this January, it shipped 18.2 million, a 1,836 percent increase. Imports of cotton knit trousers were up 1,332 percent from a year ago.

These figures may be understated because China ships a large part of its goods through Hong Kong, and those shipments are not included.

Fears that China is going to flood the world market with cheap textile exports have already inflamed tensions between Washington and Beijing because of worries about American manufacturing plants being closed and thousands of jobs being lost.

Already, in January, the first month after global quotas were lifted, 12,200 jobs were lost in the United States apparel and textile industries, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Some analysts have predicted that China could capture as much as 70 percent of the American market in the next two years. Before the end of quotas, about 16 percent of apparel sold in the United States came from China.

Last year, the United States trade deficit with China set a record of $162 billion, making it the largest trade imbalance ever recorded by the United States with a single country. To be sure, some textile importers say this phenomenon may be a one-time surge. Companies, for instance, may have put off shipping goods at the end of last year to avoid the quotas.

"Nobody knows if it's going to last," said Andrew Grossman, who runs GAV, a company that designs and manufactures clothes for Calvin Klein and Emanuel Ungaro. "So you're not seeing it passed on to the consumer."

Because of uncertainty over currency fluctuations and the process of lifting quotas, apparel producers like GAV have not reduced their prices to retailers. Moreover, poor countries like Bangladesh, Cambodia and Sri Lanka are pressing Washington to pass legislation giving them lower tariffs to help support a crucial source of their livelihood. Some trade experts say that China has achieved its status over the years by providing questionable bank loans and subsidies to its industry.

Still, it is clear that efforts to move toward more open trade have freed China and other countries of many textile and apparel quotas and restrictions. And they have set the stage for China to become a global textile and apparel behemoth, lowering clothing prices for consumers around the world but upsetting and rewriting current trade balances.

The January evidence showed blockbuster gains for Chinese textile and apparel makers - a surge that some textile experts had been predicting long before the quotas came to an end.

The 25 countries that are part of the European Union also registered big increases, importing about $1.4 billion worth of textile and apparel goods from China, up from about $975 million a year ago, a jump of 46 percent.

"This is not a surprise; it is not a revelation," said Donald Brasher, president of Global Trade Information Services in Columbia, S.C., which tracks and releases trade figures from around the world and was the first to publish China's official trade statistics. "We're going from a quota regime to a quota-free regime. And China's one of the most competitive producers. What do you expect?"

But representatives of some of the nation's biggest textile and apparel manufacturers say the figures seem to bear out their worst fears: what they see as China's unfair dominance of the world textile trade because of possible currency undervaluation and government subsidies of big textile operations in China.

"The wolf is at the door and only the U.S. government can slam it shut, and it needs to do it right now," said Cass Johnson, president of the National Council of Textile Organizations, a trade group that is pressing the administration to impose immediate limits on Chinese imports.

"The action the government takes or doesn't take will affect 30 million workers around the world and perhaps half a million in this country."

"This isn't like the Y-2K crisis where everyone was afraid of a computer meltdown that never happened," Mr. Johnson added. "This is happening and the consequences are frightening."

In January alone, China shipped more apparel in some categories, like cotton trousers, than it had in the previous year and a half, representing approximately a fourteenfold increase, according to Mr. Johnson's trade group. For instance, China sent nearly 27 million pairs of cotton trousers to the United States; the quota had held the number to 1.9 million a year ago. There were also big increases in everything from underwear to gowns.

China's customs figures, which were released March 1 to Global Trade Information Services, are often the earliest indication of China's exports to the United States.

This Friday, the Commerce Department is expected to release its own trade data with China. However, the figures could include Chinese apparel that was shipped in December, before quotas ended, but that landed in the United States in January. Those figures might show less spectacular jumps in trade with the United States, according to textile industry officials.

Many Democrats in Congress say that imports from China are the biggest trade problem for the United States. Representative Benjamin L. Cardin of Maryland, the ranking Democrat on the trade subcommittee of the House Ways and Means Committee, said in an interview that he would push the administration to pay more attention to China's trading practices.

Some American manufacturers say that China is increasing exports by undervaluing its currency, which makes its products cheaper in dollars for American companies.

The Bush administration says it has put pressure on Chinese officials to revalue their currency and take steps on other trade issues. Moreover, the administration did agree last year to put limits on some Chinese textile and apparel imports in advance of any market disruption.

But importers and retailers, particularly the National Retail Federation, persuaded the Court of International Trade to issue an injunction against the administration's limits. Still, a continued surge in Chinese imports could lead to another push by the administration to provide relief for American apparel and textile manufacturers. If the surge is temporary, the administration is less likely to apply limits.

Brenda Jacobs, the Washington trade counsel to the U.S. Association of Importers of Textiles and Apparel, said she was wary of the new Chinese figures and would wait to see the United States trade figures, which will be released on Friday.

"I just don't know what to expect; there will be shifting of production," said Ms. Jacobs, whose group supported the end of quotas. "But put this in context - there were a lot of companies that held off shipping goods in December in order to be sure they would not be caught in the quota system."

Victory at Georgetown - Living Wage

March 1, 2005

After 3 years of public pressure and 9 days of a hunger strike, where twenty-five students lost a collective 270 lbs, Georgetown University agreed to the demands of the Living Wage Coalition. Students helped campus workers win a living wage, namely $14.00 per hour. Visit the Living Wage Coalition's website for more information or read Georgetown University's press release regarding the new policy.

Older News>