Three years after winning permanent jobs for 452 workers employed for more then a decade as casuals at the GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) Horlicks factory in Nabha, northwest India, the union faces a vicious backlash from the company.

A recent study of workplace amputations in the US state of Illinois points to a "public health emergency" and puts agency work at the center of that emergency. The researchers looked at nearly 4,000 amputations - over three-quarters of them involving fingertips, but also arms and legs - and found that half of the employers with the highest number of amputations over a 7-year period were temp agencies.

Striking Unilever workers seeking just compensation for their transfer to Sodexo made a dramatic appearance at the FNV Bondgenoten Congress in the Hague on March 21, calling on the company to meet their demands.

Over 2000 hotel workers and union leaders of Local 226, Las Vegas branch of the IUF-affiliate UNITE HERE, demonstrated on the famous Strip in front of the Cosmopolitan Hotel March 20 to highlight their demand for a collective agreement.

Striking sugar cane cutters from La Cabaña plantation in Cauca valley, North Colombia will this week step up their action by moving their protest to the capital, Bogota.  The workers, members of the IUF-affiliated SINTRAINAGRO, called a strike on March 6 after months of fruitless negotiations with their employer. They are protesting about wage levels being below the local rate, lack of overtime and holiday pay and La Cabana’s continued use of labour providers supplying workers on short term contracts.

The Sodexo IUF global framework agreement was the platform to enable Sodexo workers from La Loma, a mining region of Colombia to gain their first collective agreement. Claims for the collective agreement were first forwarded to the company in February 2012 but at first Sodexo refused to recognise SICO, the workers union. According to the SICO National President Julio Ruben Padilla,the Company changed its mind and negotiated in good faith due to the resistance of the workers, support from the national federation CUT and through the intervention of the IUF.

The IUF has protested to the UK Government about its plans to abolish the Agricultural Wages Board (AWB) which sets minimum wages and conditions for agriculture.

Our affiliate FESTRAS, in Guatemala, condemns in the strongest terms the murder of the trade union leader Kyra Zulueta Enríquez Mena, last Friday 22 March. She died as a consequence of several bullets being fired to execute her.