In his 2013 State of the Union Address (SOTU), President Obama announced that the U.S. would soon begin talks on a “Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership”—in other words, the U.S. will begin negotiating a “free trade agreement” (FTA) with the European Union (EU).

This Thursday at noon, working families in Washington, D.C., will be rallying at the Mexican Embassy in solidarity with workers in Mexico as part of a global Day of Action. The campaign is based around four basic goals to:

A recent Wall Street Journal editorial, American Unions vs. Bangladesh's Workers (subscription only), dismisses poverty and workers' rights in a country where devastating garment factory fires have killed 119 people in recent months, which the Journal has reported on. The editorial makes several erroneous points about garment workers in Bangladesh, and the threat to remove the country's duty-free status because of workers' rights violations.  

T-Mobile, the telecom company that last year closed seven call centers in the United States and shipped more than 3,300 jobs overseas, is running its remaining U.S. call center operations with abusive and intimidating tactics, T-Mobile workers at the company’s Charleston, S.C., call center told a workers' rights hearing (see video, below) last week.

Workers at a number of T-Mobile (owned by Deutsche Telekom) call centers are mobilizing to win a voice at work with the Communications Workers of America (CWA) and have been met with a fierce anti-union campaign.

Women, men and children across the world are taking collective action this Valentine's Day to speak up and demand an end to violence against women. Union leaders and workers in the United States have joined this massive global coalition. Flash mobs (a dance in a public place coordinated by a group of people) are being held in cities from San Francisco to Delhi, India; Manila, Philippines; Khartoum, Sudan; and many more.

Tell PKC to Reinstate Workers in Mexico is a cross-post from IndustriALL Global Union's website. 

PKC [a Finnish auto-parts supplier] sacked more than 100 union supporters, including the entire union committee in December 2012 for campaigning for the election of an independent trade union, the National Union of Mine and Metalworkers (known as “Los Mineros”), at their plants in Ciudad Acuña, Mexico.

Trade unionist Valentin Urusov is proof that in Russia it’s still possible to be imprisoned in the 21st century equivalent of the gulag for standing up for worker rights on the job. An electrical fitter at an ore-processing mill owned by the diamond mining company Alrosa, Urusov has spent more than four years of a six-year term in a penal colony in Yakutia in far northern Russia.

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.