Unlike Las Vegas, what happens in Mississippi won’t stay in Mississippi, as far as Nissan is concerned. 

The president of the largest labor federation in Brazil, representing 7.4 million workers, got a close-up look at the situation in Canton, Miss., last week, when he attended the meeting at Tougaloo College that was attended by nearly 500 people, along with the Mississippi Alliance for Fairness at Nissan (MAFFAN). 

The AFL-CIO and Guatemalan labor unions first filed a labor complaint under the Dominican Republic-Central America Free Trade Agreement in 2008. In the nearly five years since the complaint was filed, the situation for workers has not improved. They still struggle to organize their workplaces without retribution, they still fight to receive the pay promised for work performed and they continue to be targeted with violence, including murder, for standing up for the most basic of internationally recognized labor rights. The International Trade Union Confederation reports that 10 unionists were murdered there in 2011—the most recent year for which statistics are available. It is long past time for the government of Guatemala to change or for the U.S. government to proceed to arbitrate the case. Justice delayed is justice denied—and for far too long, justice has been denied for Guatemala's workers. 

Seven young women, at least two of them teenagers, died over the weekend in a Bangladesh garment factory fire—the 28th fire incident to frighten, injure or kill Bangladeshi garment workers since a deadly blaze at the Tazreen Fashion factory killed at least 112 workers in late November, according to the AFL-CIO's Solidarity Center staff in Bangladesh. At least 491 garment workers have been injured on the job since the Tazreen blaze, according to information compiled by the Solidarity Center. The Solidarity Center's mission is to help build a global labor movement by strengthening the economic and political power of workers around the world through effective, independent and democratic unions.

Bangladesh: Seven Women Dead in a Preventable Factory Fire originally appeared on the Solidarity Center's blog. 

The promotional website for AERODESPACHOS in El Salvador features workers loading airplanes, transporting baggage and servicing engines. Yet while the airline ground services company wants to showcase its workforce, it is unwilling to provide safe working conditions and decent wages, its employees say. And when the ground servicing crew sought to address safety and health issues by forming a union, AERODESPACHOS fired 96 employees—nearly its entire staff—to reduce the number of workers seeking to join a union and so legally disqualify their efforts.

Tell the El Salvadoran government to end its contract with AERODESPACHOS and work to reinstate the employees.

Three years after the disastrous earthquake struck Haiti, workers and their families continue to struggle as the cost of living keeps rising while wages—for those who have jobs—remain the same. Informal discussions by the AFL-CIO Solidarity Center staff with Haitian export-processing workers this month indicate that in the past year, the cost of food and education has increased between 20% and 25%, while rent and transportation have risen between 15% and 20%.

This is a cross-post from the AFL-CIO Solidarity Center’s Tula Connell.

Some 52 million people older than 15—primarily women—labor as domestic workers around the world, according to a report released today by the International Labor Organization (ILO). Of those, 83 percent are women. The vast number of domestic workers, 21.4 million, are in Asia and the Pacific region, with 19.6 million in Latin America, 5.2 million in Africa and 2.1 million in the Middle East.

Finally, 17 months after the U.S. Department of Labor accepted a complaint detailing the government of Bahrain’s repeated violations of the free-trade agreement with the United States, the department has reported its findings. 

This report, issued today, is laudable for its call for bilateral consultations to address ongoing worker rights violations. However, the delay in its release has been costly—for Bahraini workers, for U.S. credibility as a human rights defender and for workers in other countries with bilateral trade agreements with the United States. If the U.S. government does not live up to its commitments and hold Bahrain accountable to the trade agreement’s labor chapter, then why should we expect other trading partners to bother?  

As policymakers in the United States wrangle over how to avert the austerity bomb, the European Parliament voted overwhelmingly in favor of the financial transactions tax (FTT). The European FTT is expected to raise as much as €37 billion each year ($48 billion in U.S. dollars).

This is an excerpt of Human Rights Day 2012: Marking Worker Rights Worldwide from the AFL-CIO's Solidarity Center. 

Nearly 3,000 trade union leaders have been murdered in Colombia over the past 20 years and the killing continues, with at least 35 unionists murdered so far this year. Yet behind each statistic is an individual, says Colombian lawyer and human rights activist, Yessica Hoyos Morales. Someone much like her father, Jorge Darío Hoyos Franco, a Colombian labor leader, who was assassinated in 2001 by two hired hit men.

This is an excerpt of the AFL-CIO Solidarity Center's Interview: Labor, Business Must Partner for Ethical Investment in Burma. 

Political transformation is happening fast in Burma, but social and cultural change are just beginning—putting the country at a key tipping point for how it ultimately will be structured, says Pyi Thit Nyunt Wai, general secretary of the Federation of Trade Unions-Burma (FTUB). 

“We’re starting at ground zero. The country is like dough that’s being kneaded. We must decide what shape it has to be,” he says.