A settlement has been reached in the long-running dispute between workers and Amalgamated Plantations Private Ltd (APPL).at the company's Nowera Nuddy tea garden in northern West Bengal, India. APPL is majority-owned  by Tata Global Beverages, part of India's Tata Group.

Representatives from the IUF-affiliated Farm Labor Organizing Committee (FLOC) completed a 2 week European tour of meetings and protests targeting Reynolds America & BAT. The aim of the tour was to convince BAT to take responsibility for the appalling migrant worker conditions on tobacco farms in the US. FLOC President Baldemar Velasquez and Diego Reyes, a migrant worker from North Carolina opened the tour in Germany on April 17, followed by activity in Turkey and ending with a protest action at the London BAT Shareholders’ AGM on April 28.

Conrad Fedler is suffering from inoperable, terminal lung cancer. He worked at the Roquette USA plant in Keokuk, Iowa from 1996 until last June, when his illness forced him onto disability. On September 28, 2010 - the day the company locked out hundreds of union members for insisting on their right to negotiate a collective agreement - Roquette raised his health insurance premiums by over a thousand dollars monthly - from USD 380 per month to 1,467 per month.

On May Day 2011 the IUF sends fraternal greetings to our members and to workers everywhere. Democratic revolt in North Africa and the Middle East, in which unions have played a decisive role, has inspired profound hope in the region and around the world, amplifying May Day's historic message that organized labour remains the motor force for democracy.

Agreements to eliminate precarious plantation work in Costa Rica, to negotiate an international sexual harassment and discrimination agreement and to explore provision of special employment protection for union representatives were products of the Costa Rica meeting between the IUF, COLSIBA and Chiquita on April 19.

Some 160 Spanish workers producing Kraft-branded products are at risk of joining the growing line of unemployed former Kraft workers.

Unions have long contended that precarious workers have higher rates of accidents, injuries and illness on the job. Precarious work is also the hidden underside of the Japanese nuclear power industry, where contract workers have an average level of radiation exposure 16 times that of the small layer of permanent workers.

The IUF, whose governing Executive Committee met in Geneva, Switzerland March 29, 30, has strongly condemned the use of legislation originally designed to combat organized crime to attack fundamental union rights in the United States.