On July 16, Kyungshin-Lear, a car parts manufacturing company with a factory in Honduras, fired three of nine newly elected union leaders. Within the following days, we have learned from our colleagues at the AFL-CIO Solidarity Center that the remaining six of the nine newly elected union leaders also were fired. Since January 2012, Kyungshin-Lear has fired 26 union leaders, with the company's most recent illegal firing of all nine union leaders in April 2013, and then in July, firing the nine union leaders who had been recently elected to replace the fired leaders from April.

As results continue to be announced in Zimbabwe’s national elections, trade unions and other civil society partners are feeling a sense of dejection, as it appears that not only will Robert Mugabe continue his 33-year rule of the country for another five years, but his party ZANU-PF will secure a two-thirds parliamentary majority.

Women at every level are “moving the labor movement in new directions” and “inventing new kinds of worker organizations and new ways of being a trade unionist,” says labor historian Dorothy Sue Cobble.

Cobble, distinguished professor of history and labor studies at Rutgers University, was among several speakers opening a two-day AFL-CIO Solidarity Center conference this morning, “Women’s Empowerment, Gender Equality and Labor Rights: Transforming the Terrain.” Nearly 100 labor and community activists from 20 countries are gathered here in São Paulo, Brazil, to share strategies for achieving gender equality and worker rights in their unions and their workplaces.

On Monday, July 29, France’s trade minister Nicole Bricq called for increased transparency in U.S.-European Union trade negotiations, also known as the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), through a statement to the French newspaper Liberation. 

As Zimbabwe heads to the polls for parliamentary and presidential elections in two days, the country is again poised for another tightly contested and controversial struggle for popular support between those seeking to transition the country to multi-party democracy, rule of law and respect for human rights and an entrenched security and political establishment led by an aging autocrat, Robert Mugabe, seeking to hold on to the spoils of power. 

The AFL-CIO, along with labor and human rights advocates from around the world, opposed the United States–Colombia Free Trade Agreement, arguing that Colombia was not an appropriate trade agreement partner because of its history of denying workers' rights. The recent subcontracting at Tampa Cargo illustrates how workers are underpaid while their freedom of association and the right to collective bargaining continues to be denied. 

The AFL-CIO, along with labor and human rights advocates from around the world, opposed the United States-Colombia Trade Agreement, arguing that Colombia was not an appropriate trade agreement partner because of its history of denying workers' rights. The struggle at Claro provides a recent example that freedom of association and the right to collectively bargain continue to be denied.   

As Zimbabwe’s July 31 presidential elections approach, the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU), one of the country’s only nonpolitical, mass-based movements, plans to actively promote free and fair elections and, equally important, hold lawmakers accountable after elections.

Thirty-eight-year-old Gloria Isabel Ramírez has worked in Colombia’s flower industry since the age of 14. Today, the single mother of one makes $10 a day, works seven days a week and lives in her town’s poorest neighborhood, located less than an hour’s drive from the nation’s capital, Bogotá.  

In her hilltop shanty, Gloria Isabel Ramirez had rice and beans and potatoes for dinner and nothing else.

But she was not complaining.

Some nights she has nothing for herself and her 12-year-old son, so she pleads with neighbors for food or money to buy food.

And sometimes they go hungry in their two-room home, cobbled out of worn wooden planks that let the winds whip through. A few wobbly planks lead up to the doorway.