The 2012 ILO Annual Conference is under way in Geneva, Switzerland, and representatives of employers have blocked discussion of some of the worst cases of workers' rights violations. The conference usually brings up the most serious cases from the annual report of the ILO’s Committee of Experts, a 17-member committee of eminent international jurists and legal scholars. But this year, the Employers Group has used procedural maneuvers to block discussion of any cases.

Pacific Rim Cayman LLC, the mining company determined to extract gold along the banks of El Salvador’s Lempa River, has failed in its
attempt to use the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) to force the Salvadoran government to allow it to mine in the region. El Salvador has opposed Pacific Rim’s plans because the process threatens cyanide leakage into the Lempa River, whose basin covers 49 percent of the territory of El Salvador and is the main water source for a majority of the nation’s population.

Blake Poindexter is a former T-Mobile USA worker who had worked in a call center in Frisco, Texas, before the company announced in March it would close that center along with six others. Last week, he urged Deutsche Telekom CEO René Obermann to respect T-Mobile USA workers’ right to join together in a union and stop the company’s harassment of workers.

Guy Ryder was elected Monday as the new director-general of the International Labor Organization (ILO). He says his new post is a:

tremendous opportunity, in the middle of this global crisis, to make a difference to the lives of millions of people...to change their lives for the better.

The AFL-CIO and several individual unions, including the Machinists, the Steelworkers, Mine Workers and Food and Commercial Workers in recent days met with leadership of the new Colombian Labor Inspectorate and Department of Labor officials, to discuss how the inspectorate is working to promote and protect workers' rights in Colombia—and what it is doing to make sure workers who exercise their rights can do so without putting their lives on the line.

Sessi Agnes Funmi has the simple goal of awakening the “sleeping giant.” That’s how her Nigerian union has been tagged, she said. And
it’s starting to work.

Funmi is the head of the Lagos State University Branch of the Senior Staff Association of Nigerian Universities. The union has about
8,040 members, who are the non-teaching professional university staff. The members include nurses, physicians, administrators and senior housekeepers and security officers.

This is a cross-post from the AFL-CIO Solidarity Center.

Bangladesh’s labor code addresses pay, working hours and on-the-job conditions. However, in the shrimp-processing industry, the code is not being adequately enforced, according to the Solidarity Center’s new report, "The Plight of Shrimp-Processing Workers of Southwestern Bangladesh." Indeed, Bangladeshi shrimp-processing workers—the majority of whom are women—still face inadequate health and safety protections at work and receive less than the minimum wage, among other violations of their rights.

The U.S. government will investigate charges that the government of Honduras has failed to address “repeated and well-documented violations of workers' rights.” Those charges were made in a petition filed in March by the AFL-CIO and major Honduran trade unions with the U.S. Department of Labor’s Office of Trade and Labor Affairs (OTLA).

Although Indonesia's economy is growing and poverty decreasing, the average worker is not reaping the benefits of a booming economy, according to Jamie Davis, the AFL-CIO Solidarity Center's country program director in Jakarta. At a well-attended brown-bag discussion at the AFL-CIO last week, Davis discussed the progress of Indonesian workers since the end of the oppressive Suharto dictatorship in 1998 and their opportunities for forming unions. The door to the middle class is not opening for the majority of workers in the formal sector, most of whom only receive minimum wage—which all policymakers agree is not a living wage.

José Enrique Morales Montaño, of the Center of Support for Workers (CAT) in Puebla was kidnapped and physically tortured on May 15 as he was headed to the local labor board to accompany a group of textile workers, according to the international labor news aggregator, LabourStart. His captors kept a gun pressed to his head for extended periods and threatened to kill him and the other members of the CAT. In the evening of the same day, they left him on an abandoned highway to Veracruz, and stole his cell phone and backpack; he suffered serious injuries. The next morning, CAT Director Blanca Velázquez received a message from Montaño’s stolen cell phone stating: “You will die, bitch.”

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