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Judi Lynn

(160,219 posts)
Mon Apr 22, 2013, 04:28 PM Apr 2013

"I Jumped to Save My Body": Walmart Slammed Over Nicaragua Stabbings and Bangladesh Fire

"I Jumped to Save My Body": Walmart Slammed Over Nicaragua Stabbings and Bangladesh Fire
Monday, 22 April 2013 10:22 By Josh Eidelson, The Nation | Report

~snip~
Stabbings and Beatings in Nicaragua

“We’re making their clothes, the clothes they’re going to sell,” fired Nicaraguan factory worker Darwing Lopez-Alanez told The Nation in Spanish. “And so they have a role in what goes on inside there.” Lopez-Alanez, the secretary-general of a new union seeking recognition, was one of fifteen union leaders fired at two factories owned and operated by SAE-A, an apparel company based in South Korea.

In a March memo to Walmart and other US brands, the labor monitoring group Workers Rights Consortiumwrote that its preliminary investigation “finds that SAE-A brutally violated these workers’ associational rights by directing and paying a mob of more than 300 other workers—while on paid company time—to attack these employees with scissors and metal pipes.”

Lopez-Alanez said that he began organizing with his co-workers in hopes of confronting excessive workload and mistreatment by management. “I had seen it all,” he told The Nation. Because the recognized union in the factory always sided with management, said Lopez-Alanez, he and a group of co-workers began trying to organize a new one.

On March 4, the conflict turned violent. Lopez-Alanez and other fired workers showed up with leaflets outside his factory at 5 AM. “We planned a peaceful protest,” he said. An hour later, as some workers arrived at the factory, Lopez-Alanez and his comrades struck up conversations with them, “telling them that we needed to defend our rights, talking about the mistreatment at the factory that we were working in, the terrible conditions, that everything only seemed OK when a representative from one of the brands came.”

More:
http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/15871-i-jumped-to-save-my-body-walmart-slammed-over-nicaragua-stabbings-and-bangladesh-fire

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