Workers at the Millennium Seoul Hilton Hotel launched a collective action on October 15 by wearing union vests while working and refusing overtime. The action followed management's refusal to reach an agreement on key union demands, including the recruitment of permanent workers and the extension of the retirement age.

The long-announced split became official on October 2, but shareholders got a big surprise: it is Mondelez, not the new North American grocery company Kraft Foods Group (KRFT) which has inherited the former Kraft Foods Inc. enormous debt! All the debt has gone to Mondelez, where workers will be consigned to paying the interest charges in an organization driven by aggressive cost-cutting.

Four years after initiating legal action, creditors of the bankrupt US retailer Mervyn's have won a major settlement from the private equity firms and banks which drove it out of business by piling on debt and stripping the company of cash. Bankruptcy resulted in the elimination of 18,000 jobs. Will it change the terms of the private equity debate which has resurfaced in the US with the nomination of former Bain boss Mitt Romney as the Republican presidential candidate?

Trashed!, the latest number of the online workplace health and safety publication Hazards, brings together recent research from around the world to document the many ways precariou work generates alarmingly higher rates of work-related injuries, illness and death for the growing number of disposible workers when measured against those employed on direct, permanent contracts.

Several years of organizing by the Malaysian Food Workers Union (FIEU) and pressure on the company by the IUF and its affiliate the NZ Dairy Workers Union finally paid off when FIEU received a letter from Fonterra granting recognition to the union as the sole collective bargaining agent for all the permanent workers.

Yacine Zaïd was sentenced by the court in Ouargla on Monday, 8 October, to a six-month suspended prison sentence and a fine of 10,000 dinars (about 100 euros). Accused of "insulting a police officer," he had been remanded in custody for one week.

A new publication from IndustriAll documents the explosive growth of temporary agency work, highlights the ways it is undermining employment and trade union rights and describes how unions are fighting back, industrially and politically.