Those few industries where child labor continues are concentrated in agriculture (especially cotton and cocoa), mining and small-scale weaving/sewing operations.  This latter area is where the world’s football teams got the shock of their collective lives fifteen years ago.  At the moment of most intense anti-sweatshop activism in the West – 1996 - soccer ball production was exposed as a pre-teens-in-penury cesspool; expensive, hand-stitched balls for export and bearing the world federation of football clubs’ “certified for match play” stamp of approval.

This crackdown on BCWS’s important work to organize and support workers
will send a clear, chilling message to  unions and other organizations
that dare to speak out in defense of workers in Bangladesh.  We need
your support now to fight back and show our solidarity with BCWS and the
workers of Bangladesh.

Please send a letter today to the Prime Minister of Bangladesh insisting that BCWS’s legal status be reinstated and
that all harassment of BCWS cease immediately.

According to the workers on strike, the workers at Riegel have not been paid their social security for the past 11 months, in spite of the amount for social security being deducted from their wages. Event though the company paid part of the wages owed in response to the first week of the strike, many other workers have not received any compensation, including the workers leading the resistance. Workers are also owed their family subsidies and were not given their uniforms and appropriate working attire during their time at Riegel. Magdalena Toscano has worked for two CTAs. Under a plastic man-made shack put up by the strikers, she tells me in her previous job she worked for five months and was never paid.

Over the past year, ILRF, SEIU 32BJ, LiUNA, Carpenters Union and many others have been working to get the DC City Council to adopt responsible contracting language as part of the procurement overhaul that is moving through the legislative process.  In particular there have been conversations focused on DC govt adopting a “sweatfree” procurement policy and joining the Sweatfree Purchasing Consortium. This is vital because it ensures that all DC contracts and vendors, and subsequently workers who are paid with DC tax dollars, are to be done under fair labor conditions.