Wal-Mart Suspends Seafood Supplier Over Work Conditions
Source: New York Times
Wal-Mart Stores has suspended one of its seafood suppliers in the South as an advocacy group for foreign workers pressed the retailer to improve working conditions there and at a dozen other suppliers cited for hundreds of federal labor violations.
The advocacy group, the National Guestworker Alliance, said on Friday that it had found terrible conditions at C. J.'s Seafood, a crawfish company in Breaux Bridge, La. Several immigrant workers said they had been forced to work 16 to 24 hours consecutively and had even been locked into the plant. Guest workers said they sometimes labored more than 80 hours a week, had been threatened with beatings to press them to work faster and had been warned that their families in Mexico would be hurt if they complained to government agencies.
"It's one of the worst workplaces we ever encountered anywhere," said Scott Nova, executive director of the Worker Rights Consortium, a university-sponsored monitoring group that was asked by the guest-worker advocates to investigate C. J.'s Seafood. "The extreme lengths of the shifts people were required to work, the employer's brazenness in violating wage laws, the extent of the psychological abuse the workers faced and the threats of violence against their families -that combination made it one of the most egregious workplaces we've examined, whether here or overseas."
Read more: http://mobile.nytimes.com/2012/06/30/business/wal-mart-suspends-seafood-supplier-over-work-conditions.xml
Good. Next, the feds should bust up this illegal employer up to revocation of corporate charter. In fact, slave labor around the world is used for seafood farming, as "The Young Turks" has reported;
ForgoTheConsequence
(4,869 posts)Were they paying their employees too much?
I kid I kid.
AtheistCrusader
(33,982 posts)DeSwiss
(27,137 posts)...particularly overseas, have a history of using chemicals and methods that would turn most people's stomachs and/or violate laws and regulations. But not all of them.
And as the oil and chemical industries pollute our water resources more and more, fish, crayfish, lobster and vertical urban farms are becoming the future of farming. Less pollution, no pesticides nor herbicides are needed. This is a growth area.
- Many farmers who find themselves incapable of competing with Big Ag are now turning to fish/shrimp farming and aquaponics.....
Redclaw Crawfish Farming
{crawfish as large as lobsters}
K&R
Quantess
(27,630 posts)I will try to watch one and see if I can continue with the others.
Sherman A1
(38,958 posts)Glad to see Wal Mart take a positive step.
Omaha Steve
(99,730 posts)marble falls
(57,246 posts)brovibes
(5 posts)6000eliot
(5,643 posts)Alcibiades
(5,061 posts)And the answer is, pretty horrific. Of course, it helps that this is a US employer. I'm sure these abuses happen regularly at many of the Chinese suppliers for Wal-Mart, but they would never stop using an overseas supplier for doing this, because, if they did, they wouldn't have anything to sell.
crim son
(27,464 posts)While there are still so many wrongs, I applaud any step they make in the right direction.
hughee99
(16,113 posts)to all employees, and Walmart was afraid those "work conditions" might spread.