Workers at Walmart are continuing their actions to win respect and bring change to Walmart , with a demonstration today outside Walmart’s Bentonville, Ark., headquarters and with strikes yesterday by workers at stores in Dallas; Seattle; Miami; Sacramento, Calif.; Orlando, Fla.; and in the Chicago and Washington areas.

Colby Harris, who earns $8.90 an hour after three years working at a Walmart in Lancaster, Texas, told The New York Times:

We’re protesting because we want better working conditions and better wages and because we want them to stop retaliating against associates who exercise their right to talk about what’s going on in their stores.

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).

While T-Mobile’s parent company, Deutsche Telekom, respects workers’ right to bargain collectively in Germany, T-Mobile’s U.S. management has fought workers’ attempts to join the Communications Workers of America (CWA) with campaigns of delaying tactics and interference to intimidate workers.

A complaint filed today with the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) describes how Deutsche Telekom has engaged in anti-union activity in the United States that violates the organization’s guidelines for multinational enterprises.

Deutsche Telekom, the parent company of T-Mobile USA, boasts in its annual report on corporate responsibility that it is committed to the global labor standards established by the International Labor Organization (ILO), a branch of the United Nations.  Except, it appears, when it comes to T-Mobile workers in the United States.

Unions representing workers at IBM around the world are coming together to form a new IBM Global Union Alliance to faciliate cooperative efforts to increase union membership in the company and pursue global agreements to improve working conditions of IBM employees worldwide. They also will support workers facing anti-union actions by the company.

More than 500 workers from ver.di, the German telecommunications workers union, today descended on Deutsche Telekom’s global annual shareholders’ meeting in Cologne  to demand  the company ensure its American employees at T-Mobile USA the same rights enjoyed by its German workforce.