The London Organizing Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games (LOCOG) has agreed to get tougher with factories in China.

Pressure by unions, advocacy groups and workers themselves has resulted in new protections for workers making badges and mascots for the London 2012 Olympic Games.

Today, International Women’s Day 2012, marks a disappointing statistic: Worldwide, women are paid 18 percent on average less than their male counterparts at work. This startling fact comes from a new report released yesterday by the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC).

Seven current or former members of the Guatemalan  banana workers’ union have been murdered since 2011. Most recently, Miguel Angel González Ramírez, a member of the Izabal banana workers’ union, was shot while he was holding his young son.

AFL-CIO Industrial Union Council Director Bob Baugh, a member of a global union delegation led by the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC), sends us another in a series of reports on the new round of United Nations climate change negotiations taking place now in Durban, South Africa.

AFL-CIO Industrial Union Council Director Bob Baugh, a member of a global union delegation led by the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC), sends us another in a series of reports on the new round of United Nations climate change negotiations taking place now in Durban, South Africa.

AIDS and HIV remain a major public health issue around the world, and so does workplace discrimination against people with AIDS/HIV.

AFL-CIO Industrial Union Council Director Bob Baugh, a member of a global union delegation led by the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC), sends us the first report on the new round of United Nations climate change negotiations taking place now in Durban, South Africa.

The 17th annual meeting of the Conference of the Parties (COP 17) opened in Durban with a speech by South African President Jacob Zuma that stressed the need for dialogue, green jobs and investment. As trade unionists, we are here in force to ensure that these goals are met and that any climate agreement includes workers’ voice.  

As world leaders head to France for the the G-20 economic summit in Cannes, labor leaders from around the globe will gather nearby to represent the needs of the world’s workers. Among their demands is a Robin Hood tax on banks and financial institutions that would exact a nano-percentage of each financial transaction to the tune of 0.5 percent. (See video.) That’s one half of 1 percent on every bond or derivative traded, stocks sold and a host of other “financial instruments” bought and sold by the very institutions bailed out by the world’s taxpayers.

Teresa Casertano in the AFL-CIO Organizing Department’s Global Campaigns section sends us this report.

Some 50 leaders from communications and information and technology unions around the world took time out from a global conference to sign a letter to Deustche Telecom CEO Rene Obermann, demanding that Deutsche Telecom end its assault on workers’ rights at T-Mobile USA. T-Mobile USA, the largest Deutsche Telekom subsidiary, is waging a vicious anti-union campaign against workers who have chosen to join the Communications Workers of America (CWA).

The global union movement is calling on the labor ministers of the world’s top economies, known as the G-20, to create millions of new jobs around the world. In a statement prepared for the labor ministers meeting next week in Paris, the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC), the Trade Union Advisory Committee (TUAC) and Global Unions say 110 million jobs are needed by 2015 just to return G-20 countries to pre-crisis levels. That’s 22 million new jobs every year. Read the global unions’ statement here.