Sample: The Responsible Source

The Responsible Source is a database of news articles related to social compliance, worker welfare and corporate social responsibility. Since 2003, STR staff has summarized relevant news articles from a variety of sources and added them to this database on a weekly basis. Users are able to search through the news articles by topic or date.

Below are samples of the kinds of articles to which subscribers will have access to:

Minimum wage body 'calls for floor of HK$28'
South China Morning Post , 8/31/2010
More than 300,000 low-paid workers will get a pay rise if Chief Executive Donald Tsang adopts the HK$28 hourly wage floor reportedly hammered out by the Provisional Minimum Wage Commission. The commission, established 18 months ago to propose the city's first statutory minimum wage, said yesterday it had made its unanimous recommendation to Tsang, who would make the final decision. A person who is close to unions, said it had advised HK$28 an hour - higher than the HK$25 that business groups had urged but lower than the HK$33 that the unions had fought for. The Hong Kong Employers Federation said HK$28 - which would give a rise to at least 314,000 people, or 11.3 per cent of the workforce - would be too high and could cause job losses, while unionists said they would fight on for HK$33.
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US: European Corporate Hypocrisy
Human Rights Watch , 9/2/2010
Many European companies that publicly embrace workers' rights under global labor standards nevertheless undermine workers' rights in their US operations, Human Rights Watch said in a report issued today. The 128-page report, "A Strange Case: Violations of Workers' Freedom of Association in the United States by European Multinational Corporations," details ways in which some European multinational firms have carried out aggressive campaigns to keep workers in the United States from organizing and bargaining, violating international standards and, often, US labor laws. Companies cited include Germany-based Deutsche Telekom's T-Mobile USA and Deutsche Post's DHL, UK-based Tesco's Fresh & Easy Neighborhood Markets and G4S Wackenhut security, France-based Sodexo food services and Saint-Gobain industrial equipment, Norway-based Kongsberg Automotive, and the Dutch firm Gamma Holding.
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Workers at L.A. recruiting company indicted in human-trafficking, forced-labor conspiracy
LA Times , 9/2/2010
Employees and the owner of a Los Angeles-based labor-recruiting company were indicted Thursday by a federal grand jury in Honolulu for allegedly engaging in a human-trafficking conspiracy involving Thai immigrants who were forced to work on farms, the FBI said. The indictment alleges that Global Horizons Manpower Inc., located in Westwood, was involved in a scheme to coerce the labor and services of about 400 Thai nationals brought to the United States from May 2004 through September 2005 to work on farms across the country under a federal agricultural guest-worker program, the FBI said in a news release. Named in the indictment are Mordechai Orian, Pranee Tubchumpol, Shane Germann and Sam Wongsesanit, all of Global Horizons Manpower.
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China drives to boost trade union role
Morning Star , 8/31/2010
China's 134 million-strong union federation has announced that all trade unions in the country will conduct collective bargaining within two years. All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU) vice-chairman Wang Yupu said on Monday that more than 90 per cent of enterprises in China should have effective trade unions by 2012, which would represent more than 92 per cent of the developing country's workers. Mr Wang insisted that unions must safeguard their democratic character in order to prevent bosses installing union leaders who act as proxies of management. Fellow ACFTU activist Guo Wencai said that democratic elections were a key standard to measure the effectiveness of a trade union and noted that the practice of company chiefs "appointing union leaders or assigning someone from their human resources department to act as union leader hampers a trade union's independence and its ability to protect workers' rights."
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Pressure on environment to rise
Shanghai Daily , 9/1/2010
CHINA will continue to face pressure on its environment over the next 15 years as its economy continues to grow, an environment ministry official said yesterday. Though top Chinese leaders have reiterated that economic expansion should not be achieved at the expense of excess consumption of resources which may hurt the environment, the situation takes a turn for the worse when it comes to local governments and individual companies, said Yang Chaofei, the chief of the policy and regulation department under the Ministry of Environmental Protection. Yang said pollution accidents caused by big companies are a major challenge to environmental protection in China. His remarks came as several major environmental disasters occurred in China recently, including Zijin Mining Group Co's toxic leakage in Shanghang in Fujian Province and PetroChina Co's oil spill in Dalian in Liaoning Province in July.
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Clean-up bid for Yangtze set to begin
China Daily , 9/1/2010
An alarm over massive environmental damage along the Yangtze River and its Three Gorges reservoir has been raised by officials as authorities plan to spend billions of yuan treating sewage and planting forests in a major clean-up campaign. While about 75 percent of the city's sewage is treated before disposal in the river and about 80 percent of garbage is buried or treated, this is still not enough for a healthy river, Huang said. To combat river pollution, Chongqing, which has invested 50 billion yuan on sewage treatment facilities in recent years, will invest another 28 billion yuan over the next three years, Huang said. The river is facing serious pollution with tons of sewage discharged into it every second, Ma Yi, deputy chief of the regional bureau of East China Sea fishery management, which is affiliated to the Ministry of Agriculture, told the Shanghai-based Oriental Morning Post in July.
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