You know we’ve hit a new low when sweatshop workers are sad to see their jobs go. But in an unexpected, and possibly nightmarish, collision of global free trade policies, that’s what workers in developing countries with emerging garment industries, ranging from Bangladesh and Cambodia to Mexico and South Africa, are facing . . . .

For Igor Vdovchenko, going to work every day has become an act of resistance. Vdovchenko is a dockworker in Kaliningrad, a small area of Russia tucked between Poland and Lithuania. Whether or not they like their jobs, Vdovchenko and the others in the port share a certain pride in the simple ability to do the work: in their skill with the wide variety of equipment, and the complexity of the cargo they’re qualified to load, stack, and stow . . . .

Race has always been a basis on which U.S. society metes out access to wealth and power. Both in times when the overall wealth gap has grown and in times when a rising tide has managed to lift both rich and poor boats, a pernicious wealth gap between whites and nonwhite minorities has persisted . . . .

Shortly after the New Year, members of United Food and Commercial Workers Local 588 in Northern California ratified a new contract that will insure the continued decline of organized labor in the grocery industry. Perhaps no other union is as adept as the UFCW at making concessionary contracts look like a good thing. The assault on wage and benefit packages by grocery employers has been going on for years, with no end in sight . . . .

Just Garments (Confección de Prendas con Justicia) – one of the first unionized garment shops in El Salvador – is an unusual experiment in garment production . . . .