Fair Trade & Social Justice

For over two decades activists have called for a renegotiation of NAFTA—the North American Free Trade Agreement. Now, finally, after years of agitation, on August 16th renegotiations of NAFTA will start. Twenty-three years after the detrimental trade agreement went into effect, we are finally getting our chance to reconsider its provisions.

One reason that Wal-Mart workers have always had difficulty improving their lot is that they’ve never been able to form a union. At its core, Wal-Mart’s rationale for being against organized labor was not unlike that of Kodak, say, or General Electric under Lem Boulware: management had an open door policy, by which any worker could ostensibly walk in and discuss anything. Therefore, as Wal-Mart laid out in its “Manager’s Toolbox to Remaining Union Free,” “we do not believe there is a need for third-party representation. It is our position every associate can speak for him/herself without

Early in the morning on May 5, approximately 50 farmworkers were in the midst of harvesting cabbage for Dan Andrews Farms in Bakersfield, at the southern end of California’s fertile San Joaquin Valley, when they suddenly felt nauseous. “We started getting an odor, pesticide odor, coming in from the mandarin orchards west of our field,” supervisor Efron Zavalza told local news channel KGET.

More than 200 farmworkers and allies marched on the Ben & Jerry's factory Saturday, June 17, to demand that the ice cream corporation with $600 million in annual revenue implement "Milk with Dignity."