The IUF-affiliated Hotel Employees Federation of India (HEFOI) organized the Alternate Hotel Workers' Conference on April 3 to challenge the official Hotel Investors’ Conference held at Grand Hyatt Mumbai.

In a revengeful attack on 1,500 union members fighting for decent jobs for milk collection workers, the GSK Horlicks management slashed the wages of 500 workers by 18% and suspended 16 workers. Another 11 workers face false charges and possible suspension. This comes days after cutting the wages of 248 workers as punishment for joining union protest rallies.

The IUF is supporting a complaint by tea workers about bad working conditions in Amalgamated Plantations Private Ltd (APPL) tea gardens in Assam. APPL is an associate company of Tata Global Beverages. The complaint, which documents abusive living and working conditions, child labour, interference with trade union rights and poor health and safety, has been made to the Compliance Officer of the International Finance Corporation, the lending arm of the World Bank, which has a 20% share in the APPL.

McDonald's has been fined in Brazil for its fraudulent working time scheme, by which workers sat in the "break rooms", without being paid, until the employer determined that a sufficient number of customers were present for hours to be counted. With this scheme, says Samuel Da Silva Antunes, lawyer for the IUF-affiliated Contratuh, many workers failed to earn the national minimum wage.

New documents filed with the US regulatory authorities show a substantial increase in Mondelez CEO Irene Rosenfeld's total compensation for 2012 - a year marked by significant human rights violations "executional missteps" (the company's phrase) and falling revenue for the snacks maker.

Young workers from Latin America and Asia working at McDonald's in the US state of Pennsylvania on J-1 "cultural exchange" visas stopped work on March 6 to protest extreme exploitation. Supported by the National Guestworker Alliance they have demonstrated outside McDonald's headquarters and are planning an international day of action for June 6.

Management at Kraft Foods Pakistan (formerly Cadbury, now Mondelez-owned) has moved to lock out  union workers and attacked union leaders in retaliation for the union's defense of the rights of the factory's hundreds of contract workers. Mondelez makes Cadbury confectionery products in Pakistan with 53 permanent and over 350 contract workers, over 150 of whom are in 'core' manufacturing jobs.

Workers at the upscale Pearl Continental hotel in Karachi, Pakistan believed their decade-long struggle for rights and recognition was ended when the courts ordered the reinstatement of dismissed union members and officers. Management, however, refuses to accept life with a union, and with the collusion of the police union members have been suspended, beaten and subject to mass arrests.