Yearly Archives: 2017

Labour activists and Samsung Electronics victims were buoyed last week by the decisions of two long running court cases that validated that workers’ health was seriously compromised by the toxic work environment they had been exposed to. The family of Lee Eun-joo is now able to claim compensation for her […]

Nabeel Rajab, co-founder and President of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights (BCHR), and a prominent defender of human rights in Arab countries, was sentenced last week to  two years in jail. His crime was of ‘propagating false information’ when in television interviews he detailed the increasing state of repression […]

Wednesday 19 July marks the 4th anniversary of the re-opening by the Australian government of the offshore concentration camps of Manu and Nauru. The treatment and conditions for refugees in these camps, and the treatment for refugees within Australia continues to remain dire. Activists will hold protests all around Australia […]

In an event that is tragically too common in Bangladesh, at least 15 garment workers were murdered, with many others injured, when a boiler exploded last weekend. The explosion was so powerful that it led to the partial collapse of the four storey building as well as injuring people in […]

This week, the centre of New Delhi saw continuing demonstrations by thousands of Anganwadi women workers demanding better pay and an end to insecure employment (see video). Anganwadi is the Indian term for small community health centres, mainly in rural areas, that provide basic care in the areas of sexual […]

Sitel is a business process outsourcing (BPO) firm which owns and runs call centres in the Philippines and globally. Their business model has been based on exploiting un-organised workers earning low wages by shifting call centres from unionised, high wage countries. The company is now threatening to sack 1,000 workers […]

With the Gurgaon industrial belt near New Delhi expanding into near-by areas, hundreds of thousands of more workers are being employed in these industrial zones. While many of these workers don’t have a history of unionisation, they have nevertheless quickly understood the value of collective strength. The struggles at Maruti […]

This year marked the tenth anniversary of the NT Intervention – a political, social and military takeover of Aboriginal communities by the Australian government with the racist and fallacious justification of saving its children. The reality has been that this intervention has done nothing to solve the historical marginalisation of […]

The ongoing suppression of any political dissent in Thailand continued with this week’s arrest of ten human rights activists who held a public meeting to discuss constitutional changes in 2016. In another case, 60 year old Charoenchai Saetang, was arrested earlier this month by the military for being a long […]

The protest camp set up outside the headquarters of Samsung Electronics in Seoul, to call for justice for workers who have died or fallen ill, is fast approaching its second anniversary. The company has a history of vicious anti-union behaviour which results in toxic working conditions for its workforce. A […]