Union members from Moldova’s  bankrupt Glodeni-Zahar sugar company – formerly the largest in the country -  made the 3-hour journey to the capital Chisinau today to demonstrate in defense of their wages and their union leaders’ freedom. Workers at the plant, which at its peak employed some 500 people, have not been paid their wages since June 2009.

On 18 December 2010 Nestlé Russia announced the sale of its Altai confectionary plant, located in Barnaul in Central Russia. The workforce – who are part of the sale – were informed the previous day.

Workers on the Nowera Nuddy tea estate in northern West Bengal, India and their Progressive Tea Workers Union (PTWU) are as determined as ever to win justice. A contingent of workers, all PTWU members, travelled the 650 kilometers from their plantation to Kolkata on February 4 to press their demands in a rally outside the Indian headquarters of Tata Global Beverages (TGB).

The mass democratic revolt which began in Tunisia and is now spreading through North Africa and the Middle East has panicked, surprised and inspired. The panic is not limited to those with hard currency bank accounts searching for a safe haven for their cash, politicians scrambling for a comfortable exile and embassies and foreign offices undoubtedly burning and shredding the evidence of their complicity. It extends to all who profited – in the region and abroad - from their multiple links with a system of plunder nourished on violence and oppression.

The mass revolt in Tunisia which drove Ben Ali from power has also changed the balance of power within companies. Trade unions played a crucial coordination and organizing role in the social upheaval.  At Coca-Cola’s Tunisian bottler SFBT, unions have seized the opportunity to negotiate an end to agency work and roll back the abusive use of precarious employment contracts.

On April 9, 2007, 29-year-old FLOC organizer Santiago Rafael Cruz was bound with rope and beaten to death in FLOC’s Monterrey office. Cruz had only recently arrived in Mexico after 4 years as a FLOC organizer in the US. The IUF-affiliated Farm Labor Organizing Committee (FLOC) in 2005 had set up an office in Monterrey, Mexico – the first of its kind - to assist these workers in obtaining the necessary visas and educating them about their rights.

Over 550 tea workers, two-thirds of them women, rallied on the Nowera Nuddy tea estate in West Bengal, India on January 16 to launch a new stage in their campaign for their rights after management failed to respond to a January 15 deadline to meet their long-standing demands. Nowera Nuddy Tea Estate is owned by Amalgamated Plantations Private Limited, a company 49% owned by Tata Global Beverages, which is a wholly-owned subsidiary of India’s powerful Tata Group conglomerate.

On Friday, 14 January 2011, workers organized within the UGTT (General Union of Tunisian Workers), including the IUF-affiliated food and tourism federation FGAT, took part in a two-hour general strike in protest against the government’s violent suppression of the popular uprising in the face of the country’s economic problems, high unemployment and the corruption of the presidential family.