tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-165532012009-07-09T14:39:33.707-04:00How globalization affects working men and women and how it creates the need to integrate human rights, including the human rights of workers, into global rules and practices at the national, regional, and international levels through governmental, quasi-governmental, private business, labor union, and other channels*noreply@blogger.comBlogger111125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16553201.post-17435522394686043102009-07-09T14:22:00.004-04:002009-07-09T14:39:33.716-04:00

Black workers 25 to 54 years old are continuing to experience a significant decrease in their wages, according to an “economic snapshot” issued July 8 by the Economic Policy Institute.Over the last two years the weekly media wage of black workers in their prime working years dropped by 3.7% or about $23, while that of whites, Hispanics, and Asian groups of the same ages actually rose. This

Robert A. Sensernoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16553201.post-17011082442722080942009-07-07T20:25:00.007-04:002009-07-08T11:48:15.943-04:00

Pope Benedict XVI’s new encyclical, “Love in Truth,” like all Papal encyclicals, is not country-specific in the issues that it raises. Nor is it addressed only to Catholics. Rather, the Pope’s analysis deals with the “challenges of today’s world.” Nevertheless, many of those challenges ought to be of special concern to American Catholics, both as office-holders and as ordinary citizens of the

Robert A. Sensernoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16553201.post-40574016511071036592009-07-06T07:24:00.005-04:002009-07-07T20:48:46.793-04:00

The birthday I’m celebrating here is that of my wife, Dzung, the 37th of her birthdays that we’ve celebrated since we married. The image on this e-card is the cover of the Vietnamese literary quarterly that she edits and publishes with a team that includes Vu Tha Hoa, an artist in Paris who contributed the cover’s painting. Dzung and I are both writers, but she is also a poet, and much more

Robert A. Sensernoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16553201.post-16899833455870056712009-07-04T16:50:00.007-04:002009-07-04T17:29:46.923-04:00

“Nearly 20 years of anti-sweatshop activism has come to naught,” says a veteran campaigner against sweatshops, Jeff Ballinger. He contends, therefore, that it is urgent to try a new, more effective, strategy.In the lead article of Dissent magazine’s summer issue, Ballinger lays out his thoughts on such a strategy. The article's title: “Finding an Anti-Sweatshop Strategy That Works.”As an

Robert A. Sensernoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16553201.post-91385111898824510052009-07-03T16:16:00.005-04:002009-07-03T16:32:40.204-04:00

Nike is turning a blind eye to labor abuses in Vietnam factories that mass produce Nike’s athletic shoes and other sports equipment for export. That’s a finding of on-site research in Vietnam conducted after a strike last year by 20,000 workers in Nike’s supplier factories there. A three-person team from Denmark that did the investigation spoke directly, and secretly, with the workers, including

Robert A. Sensernoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16553201.post-68926963486683882402009-07-01T17:17:00.016-04:002009-07-01T21:02:28.567-04:00

In formally signing his new encyclical letter on June 29, Pope Benedict XVI said that it will return to social themes expressed by Pope Paul Vl in his encyclical “On the Development of Peoples” (Populorum Progressio) four decades ago.That should mean that Benedict’s document, to be released July 7, during the summit meeting of G8 powers in Italy, will raise controversial issues about

Robert A. Sensernoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16553201.post-82388028058227504132009-06-30T17:29:00.005-04:002009-06-30T17:48:44.424-04:00

“The present legal and moral framework that is intended to assist workers to form unions is badly broken,” a group of Catholic scholars declare in a public statement. Consequently, they are lending their support to the proposed Employee Free Choice Act for its being “rooted in and supported by Catholic Social Teaching.” The statement, signed by more than 140 members of the Catholic Scholars for

Robert A. Sensernoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16553201.post-55193001967029740422009-06-24T11:00:00.010-04:002009-06-24T11:37:56.750-04:00

You are an employer under pressure from corporate stockholders to increase the returns on their investment. You decide the way to do so is to slash your present and future labor costs by firing your current workers en masse and recruiting a set of new ones, people among the unemployed so anxious for a job that they accept anything you impose: sub-minimum pay, no vacations, a seven-day workweek,

Robert A. Sensernoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16553201.post-38187339800505017402009-06-21T18:22:00.016-04:002009-06-23T20:26:05.678-04:00

The present global economic crisis has shaken capitalism down to its roots. What will, or should, replace it? Dani Rodrik, professor of political economy at Harvard’s school of government, dealt with that question on June 16 in a public lecture at the London School of Economics.Rodrik warned against making two opposite mistakes in reacting to the crisis: returning to the protectionism of the

Robert A. Sensernoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16553201.post-36047677424972217872009-06-18T20:55:00.005-04:002009-06-18T21:12:06.090-04:00

“Globalization and Us,” the concluding chapter of my book, Justice at Work, is featured in the current issue of Blueprint for Social Justice, published by the Twomey Center for Peace Through Justice at Loyola University in New Orleans.The chapter includes 15 propositions that form a proposed paradigm for dealing with globalization issues confronting us. Blueprint highlights one of the 15 in

Robert A. Sensernoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16553201.post-88054959780320844092009-06-16T14:54:00.010-04:002009-06-16T21:06:35.808-04:00

...That depends on the kind of capitalism. Some kinds aren't worth saving.Not the kind that, as a result of the current financial crises, is inflicting more than $2,000,000,000,000 in total losses on the United States and the world.Not the kind that values the manipulation of money over the production of goods and services.Not the kind that treats labor as a commodity, a thing like shipload of

Robert A. Sensernoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16553201.post-16706096296483520812009-06-12T14:17:00.006-04:002009-06-12T14:25:07.420-04:00

About 100,000,000 girls in the world go to work instead of to school, according to estimates of the UN International Labor Organization. More than half of these, or 53,000,000, work in hazardous jobs in agriculture, manufacturing, mining, domestic services, and commercial sex, and 20,000,000 of these girls are under 12. To remind people of this stain on the 21st century, unions and human

Robert A. Sensernoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16553201.post-30519671765770811222009-06-11T17:27:00.002-04:002009-06-11T17:37:51.719-04:00

Led by an indigenous organization, tens of thousands of Peruvian Indians have for many months been engaging in non-violent protests against gas and oil exploitation of their ancestral lands. Then on June 5, when government forces in helicopters and on foot clashed with protesters blocking a road in an Amazonian province, at least 11 police officers and 30 Indians were killed and many more were

Robert A. Sensernoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16553201.post-22908196231771301752009-06-06T13:08:00.012-04:002009-06-06T15:40:46.061-04:00

It’s time to replace a foreign trade/investment model that has not worked, as Thea Mai Lee, AFL-CIO policy director, has repeatedly emphasized in Congressional testimony and talks at conferences dealing with the current economic crisis.In Congressional testimony on May 14, she singled out a critical but often ignored element that belongs in a new trade/investment model: a “balanced” treatment of

Robert A. Sensernoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16553201.post-16421449730479839132009-06-05T20:38:00.005-04:002009-06-06T13:55:33.800-04:00

Why is it that so many millions of blacks in Detroit, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and other American cities are mired in poverty? Don’t put blame exclusively on past and present policies designed to discriminate against blacks. There are also other reasons, much neglected and very durable: policies that, on their face, are non-racial but actually do contribute indirectly and yet effectively to

Robert A. Sensernoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16553201.post-9500575050258910182009-06-03T16:42:00.003-04:002009-06-03T16:48:49.866-04:00

President Obama will soon be outlining a new “framework” for international trade. Ambassador Ron Kirk, the President’s trade representative, confirmed that on June 2 in remarks to the U.S.-China Business Council in Washington.Recognizing that trade “has the potential to lift up workers in America and around the world,” Obama holds that future trade agreements need to have strong, enforceable

Robert A. Sensernoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16553201.post-3731321404824418132009-05-20T14:39:00.011-04:002009-05-20T15:23:57.866-04:00

Private employers in the United States are relying more than ever on coercive and punitive tactics against workers seeking their legal and moral right to union representation. Punishments include firing, threatening to fire, threatening to close the worksite, reducing wages and benefits, close monitoring of personal activities, and various forms of harassment, which in combination create an

Robert A. Sensernoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16553201.post-47176896466341416342009-05-19T14:30:00.010-04:002009-05-19T18:18:33.005-04:00

In the ‘90s college students taught their elders in academia that sweatshops were an evil in which the schools were complicit by selling sweatshop-made products in their own bookstores. Will this generation of college students again teach their elders, this time to the fact that the economic textbooks commonly used in their classrooms are promoting dangerously “toxic” economic policies? “Toxic

Robert A. Sensernoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16553201.post-59093252669022591732009-05-09T10:49:00.005-04:002009-05-09T11:13:14.444-04:00

The current economic crisis has the potential of exposing and correcting two “fatal flaws” of the corporate social responsibility programs, says Garrett Brown, a health and safety expert and longtime campaigner for worker rights.In a May 7 article for a professional health and safety publication, Brown identifies those flaws as follows: 1. “The schizophrenic business model that demands the lowest

Robert A. Sensernoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16553201.post-6139390445118747542009-05-05T21:20:00.007-04:002009-05-05T21:35:44.810-04:00

As part of a campaign to suppress any labor union independent of the Communist Party, the Socialist Republic of Vietnam has imprisoned at least eight trade unionists, two of them women, on “national security” charges in the past three years. In a report released May 4, Human Rights Watch publicized the wide scope of the government crackdown, denounced it, and urged the United States to pressure

Robert A. Sensernoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16553201.post-12038993643415751002009-05-01T14:01:00.005-04:002009-05-01T18:34:45.732-04:00

Should business and government shelve human rights concerns during the current global economic crisis? Of course not. It was the obsession with money as the supreme value, trumping all other values, that got us into this mess, and it would be folly to rely on that obsession now.A senior UN official has added his voice against the temptation to make human rights a casualty of the crisis. John

Robert A. Sensernoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16553201.post-16184581307781521442009-04-26T14:06:00.008-04:002009-04-26T14:35:34.895-04:00

It is up to the United States “to make history” by leading the way to a revival of the stalled Doha Round of trade negotiations, says Pascal Lamy, director-general of the World Trade Organization.In making that case in a Washington talk on April 24, Lamy emphasized that open trade needs to be “accompanied by the right domestic policies.” His list of those policies includes:-- “better worker

Robert A. Sensernoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16553201.post-61983111828562649352009-04-20T20:53:00.008-04:002009-04-25T12:25:08.346-04:00

As the Obama administration wrestles with shaping its policy on the World Trade Organization (WTO), the old questions about fairness and equal treatment pop up once again.Fairness? (I can hear the loud objections.) Why sidetrack the WTO into controversies about fairness and equal treatment?It may come as a surprise to some that the WTO is already committed to equal treatment. That commitment

Robert A. Sensernoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16553201.post-10827734218048117172009-04-17T21:12:00.005-04:002009-04-17T21:56:51.635-04:00

Every country has its dominant elites, oligarchs of one kind or another. The challenge is to change them when they get too powerful. The United States, too, has its oligarchy, the banking/financial industry, which has grown so powerful that it thrives on the chaos it created and blocks essential reforms. Ousting the oligarchy must be accomplished soon, or else we may well suffer not just a

Robert A. Sensernoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16553201.post-80762312245881885762009-04-16T19:43:00.010-04:002009-04-16T21:03:19.374-04:00

The top executive of the World Trade Organization (WTO) got an unusual public rebuke April 14 during an informal session in Geneva of the WTO trade policy review board, made up of representatives of the organization’s full membership.India’s trade envoy, Ujal Singh Bhatia, challenged a forecast that WTO Director-General Pascal Lamy made in his latest report on trade and the current economic and

Robert A. Sensernoreply@blogger.com0