Word: laboral
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...Still, "if any of the four witnesses Judge Karon Bowdre excluded would have been allowed to testify, the jury would have had the missing link," insists Terry Collingsworth, of the D.C-based International Labor Rights Fund, which helped bring the case and several other similar cases against other major companies...
Organized labor often complains of its treatment at the hands of corporate America, but its accusations pale in comparison to those made recently by the widows of Colombian mine workers in an Alabama courtroom. During a two-week trial, a Birmingham jury weighed charges that the local Drummond Coal Company bore responsibility for the murders of three union leaders who represented workers at its Colombian mine - the world's largest open pit mine. The widows lost their suit last week. But the case, and issues at the heart of it, are far from resolved: an appeal is all but certain...
...More recently, the law has been deployed by labor groups and NGOs trying to punish and modify the behavior of U.S. companies abroad. More than three dozen cases targeting companies have followed the first case, filed in 1993, against Texaco (now Chevron). That class-action suit, which alleged that a subsidiary of Texaco had improperly disposed of waste while extracting oil from the Ecuadorian Amazon, was eventually referred to Ecuadorian courts. The majority of other suits have been dismissed on jurisdictional grounds or are still pending, though at least one has been settled out of court...
While chains like Whole Foods are making inroads across the U.S., independent, non-union grocery stores are proliferating too, and many lag on labor standards. On June 19, for example, the New York State Labor Department learned of potential labor violations at one of the grocery stores in the Manhattan-based Amish Market chain. The Department sent investigators to all 11 of the chain's outposts, and the preliminary findings suggested minimum wage, overtime and tip-credit violations, according to Commissioner Patricia Smith - charges that Amish Market downplayed, calling the investigation routine...
Smith?s department has also started performing random searches in an effort to combat other labor problems, not just wage violations. "In the past, if there were violations we didn't have jurisdiction over, we would just ignore them," she says. Now, Smith instructs inspectors to alert relevant agencies. Worker advocates argue that broader enforcement of existing regulations nationwide could help improve conditions for more than 2.5 million supermarket workers...