.................................................................................................................................
Organization
Name: International Longshore and Warehouse Union
Contact Information: Marcy Rein, Communications Specialist; 415-775-0533, x 120; marcy.rein@ilwu.org
Web Site : http://www.riteaidinsider.com
Description: Founded more than 70 years ago in San Francisco, the International Longshore and Warehouse Union [ILWU] has a proud history of democracy and international worker solidarity. The ILWU represents approximately 60,000 members on the West Coast of the U.S. and Canada, and in Alaska and Hawaii. They work on the docks, on tugboats and ferries, in warehouses and distribution centers, in hotels and food processing plants and in myriad other industries.
The 600 workers at Rite Aid’s Southwest Customer Support Center in Lancaster, CA began organizing in 2006 to join the ILWU. They were tired of working at will, with no job security; of mandatory overtime that disrupted their family life; and of working in a building that had no climate control, subjecting them to blazing heat in summer and freezing cold in winter.
Rite Aid launched a vicious effort to repress the workers’ organizing. Its union-busting antics led to an investigation by the National Labor Relations Board, the agency that enforces U.S. labor law. In May 2007, Rite Aid settled 49 unfair labor practice charges with Board rather than go to trial. The charges included: Illegally firing union supporters; illegally demoting pro-union workers; threatening, discriminating against and coercing union supporters; and suspending a worker who gave testimony to the NLRB; and spying on union activities.
Rite Aid also is battling the Service Employees International Union [1199 SEIU/United Health Care Workers East] and the United Food and Commercial Workers union [UFCW] over the unions’ rights to represent workers in the newly acquired Brooks and Eckerd drug stores.
Rite Aid, the third largest drug retail chain in the U.S., has also faced charges of accounting fraud, consumer fraud and taxpayer fraud. In the late 1990s the company was caught overstating its profit by $1.6 billion; Rite Aid’s earnings re-statement in July 2000 was the largest in U.S. history at the time, and several top executives went to jail. Over the last ten years, Rite Aid has settled numerous consumer fraud charges for selling expired goods and overcharging customers; currently the New Jersey Attorney General’s office has an active case against the company on such charges. In 2004 the company paid $7 million to the federal government and several states and signed a Corporate Integrity Agreement with to settle allegations that it had overcharged Medicaid and other government health programs.
.................................................................................................................................
Organization
Name: United
Students Against Sweatshops
United Students Against Sweatshops is a student run and student led
organization made up of affiliate groups on more than 250 college,
university, and high school campuses throughout the US and Canada.
Affiliate groups organize to use their power as students to ensure that
their universities adopt policies and take actions that support those
who are organizing to challenge oppression in their workplaces and
their communities. While students focus on many different campaigns,
the campaign that is most relevant to the work of this coalition is the
campaign to ensure that Coca-Cola takes responsibility for its human
rights abuses in Colombia, India, Turkey, Indonesia, Guatemala, and
around the world. If you would like to get more involved, please visit
our website at
www.studentsagainstsweatshops.org or send an email to organize@usasnet.org
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Organization
Name: Corporate
Accountability International (formarly Infact)
Contact Information: Patti Lynn, Campaign Director, 617-695-2525, plynn@stopcorporateabuse.org
Web Site
: http://www.stopcorporateabuse.org
Description: Since 1977, Corporate Accountability International has
been exposing life-threatening abuses by transnational corporations and
organizing successful grassroots campaigns to hold corporations
accountable to consumers and society at large. Corporate Accountability
International is a non-profit, national membership organization
building an active, aware public and a core of well-trained organizers
to lead the grassroots challenge to unwarranted corporate influence.
Through
the Tobacco Industry Campaign, launched in 1993, Corporate
Accountability International is pressuring Altria/Philip Morris to stop
addicting new young customers around the world, and to stop interfering
in public policy on issues of tobacco and health. Altria/Philip Morris
is one of TIAA-CREF’s largest institutional and mutual fund
investors. The TIAA-CREF and Altria/Philip Morris also share a board
member, Elizabeth Bailey, Professor of Business Ethics at the
University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business.
"Recent
figures show that TIAA-CREF is one of Altria/Philip Morris’s
largest investors, with over $800 million in mutual funds. For years,
CREF shareholders have filed resolutions calling on CREF to begin an
orderly divestment of all tobacco investments. Now is the time for the
company’s new leadership to take these steps, and help
TIAA-CREF live up to the corporate image its trying to create for
itself." -Patti Lynn
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Organization Name: Social
Choice for Social Change: Campaign for a New TIAA-CREF
Contact Information: Contact: Neil Wollman, Co-Coordinator,
260-982-5346, nwollman@bentley.edu
Web Site
: http://www.maketiaa-crefethical.org/SocialChoiceForSocialChange.html
Description: "We successfully lobbied TIAA-CREF to establish a socially
responsible fund and then to modify it to not only exclude certain
industries, like tobacco and heavy polluters, but to take the positive
features of companies into account when making investments. We are now
seeking for them to invest in enterprises that will make direct
influences in peoples' lives, like low-income housing and venture
capital for producing socially and environmentally responsible products
and services." - Neil Wollman
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Organization Name: Press
for Change
Contact Information: Contact: Jeff Ballinger, 617 494 5106, jeffreyd@mindspring.com
Description: Workers in Nike contract factories have continued to make
demands on abusive factory managers, but there has been little
meaningful change. Just six weeks ago, several thousand Nike workers
protested at the U.S. Embassy in Jakarta because the sports shoe giant
is withdrew orders from a factory (PT Doson) which employed 7,000
workers. Independent union leaders in Indonesia believe that Doson's
workforce was singled out because workers had stood up resolutely to
Doson management. TIAA-CREF should immediately drop Nike from their
investment accounts and undertake serious research on the issue of
overseas apparel production.
"Along
with the much needed attention that corporate financial
irresponsibility has been given recently, it is equally important that
focus is given to corporate social irresponsibility. Nike is a classic
case of such irresponsibility and this is no more evident than in their
dealings with the women and men at PT Doson in Indonesia." - Jeff
Ballinger
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Organization Name: 50 Years Is Enough Network/World Bank Bonds Boycott
Contact Information: Sameer Dossani, 202 IMF BANK (463 2265)
Web Site :
www.50years.org
Description: The World Bank Bonds Boycott is an international
grassroots campaign that is building moral, political, and financial
pressure on the World Bank. The World Bank raises most of its funds by
issuing bonds. Ordinary people, through their pension funds, labor
unions, churches, municipalities, and universities are exerting
pressure for change on the World Bank by refusing to buy its bonds. The
campaign demands an end to the World Bank's harmful "structural
adjustment" policies; 100% debt cancellation; and an end to
environmentally destructive projects, especially for oil, gas, mining,
and dams.
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Organization Name: Citizen's
Coalition (Frente Civico pro Defensa del Casino de la Selva)
Contact Information: fcpcdls@yahoo.com,
madretierra7@avantel.net.mx
Web
Site and www.frentecivico.org
Description: We are a group of citizens from Cuernavaca, Mexico,
conformed of artists, families, workers ecologists, and academics. We
have been beaten and jailed for protesting against the destruction of
an environmentally, economically, and culturally important site in our
city. Two years ago, on June 30, 2001, we created our organization,
called Frente Civico, to defend murals, centenary trees, a 3500 year
Olmec archeological site and our way of life. The heritage was found in
the hotel "Casino de la Selva" now demolished to make way for two giant
warehouses. Cuernavaca is ideal for rest and a tourist attraction. With
the loss of the urban forest that was there and historic sites we will
lose air quality, tranquility and tourism based jobs. We request that
TIAA-CREF divest from Costco, an unethical company that flagrantly
breaks the law and that has gone to the extreme of sustaining fascist
policies in our country. Please visit www.procasino.org
to promote our boycott called for until the company closes the stores.
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Organization Name: Educating
for Justice, Inc.
Contact Information: Jim Keady, Director, 732.988.7322, Jim@educatingforjustice.org
Web
Site : http://www.educatingforjustice.org
Description: Educating for Justice, Inc. (EFJ) is a US-based non-profit
organization that develops, produces and distributes justice-oriented
programming and content to the educational marketplace. Through
research, online resources, digital filmmaking, grassroots educational
events, and educational publishing, EFJ seeks to raise awareness about
issues of justice and spark social change.
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Organization Name: Canadian
Committee To Combat Crimes Against Humanity
Contact Information: 3-220, de Beauharnois Street West, Montreal
(Quebec) Canada, H2N 1K2
Phone:
(514) 387-0149
Web Site :
http://www.comitecanadien.org , comitecanadien@cam.org
, comitecanadien@voila.fr
Description:
The CCCCH is a non-profit organization, not partisan, which gives
people a voice to understand and shape the laws which affect their
lives. The CCCCH engages people in the civic process, by using the
Internet to disseminate alternative information, raising the public
conscience on the crimes committed by the application of neoliberal
policies. The CCCCH has the mandate to use all the legal means to bring
the responsible of economic crimes to a court under the charge of
crimes against humanity, to advance the understanding of corporate
accountability, human rights, labor rights, social and environmental
justice issues. Among its goals is the creation of a an international
court for crimes against humainity.
CCCCH
has led along with the Frente Civico in Mexico, the boycott efforts vs
Costco corporation for the barbaric acts commited against mexican
society and world heritage. As part of the coalition it has helped
inform professors and other academic personel of the activities of the
organization.
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Organization Name: National
Community Reinvestment Coalition
Contact Information: John Taylor, President & CEO,
202-628-8866, jtaylor@ncrc.org
Web Site :
http://www.NCRC.org
Description: The National Community Reinvestment Coalition (NCRC) is
America’s trade association for community-based, non-profit
organizations (NGOs and SCOs) working to promote wealth-building in low
wealth population in the US and abroad. NCRC utilizes banking and
consumer laws and regulations to leverage the private financial
services sector to lend and invest un underserved neighborhoods. NCRC
trains community leaders (CDCs, CDFIs, CDCUs, others), government
officials, and lenders to understand how to build and influence bank
lending and investments. NCRC’s National Institute for
Economic Equality provides a comprehensive curriculum to accomplish
this objective. NCRC owns and operates the National Center for Economic
Justice (NCEJ) in Washington, DC which not only houses NCRC’s
programs but those of many NCRC members and collaborators. The NCEJ
also provides a state-of-the-art audio/video conference training center
that allows NCRC to produce broadcast quality DVDs and tapes, streaming
videos, and more, that allow such trainings to be distributed
nationally and internationally. NCRC’s policy work before the
US Congress and the Federal Bank Regulatory agencies, is well know in
the United States for its effectiveness. NCRC and its members are the
leading advocates in the fight to erase predatory or extortionist
lending. We also operate the nations most well-known financial literacy
and consumer rescue funds. Finally, NCRC is working to promote economic
justice abroad as well and has partnered with non-government
organizations in some 20 other nations to share information and
experiences.
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Organization
Name: Campaign to
Stop Killer Coke/Corporate Campaign, Inc.
Contact
Information: Ray Rogers, Director, (718) 852-2808, stopkillercoke@aol.com
Web
site: www.killercoke.org
Description:
The Campaign to Stop Killer Coke represents SINALTRAINAL, a Colombian
union that represents workers in Coca-Cola bottling plants. The
International Labor Rights Fund and the United Steelworkers of America
filed a lawsuit against The Coca-Cola Co. and its Colombian bottlers in
2001 on behalf of SINALTRAINAL, several of its members and the
survivors of Isidro Gil, one of its murdered officers. The lawsuit
charges that Coca-Cola bottlers “contracted with or otherwise
directed paramilitary security forces that utilized extreme violence
and murdered, tortured, unlawfully detained or otherwise silenced trade
union leaders.”
In
January 2004, New York City Council Member Hiram Monserrate led a
delegation that included local representatives from the AFT, AFSCME,
and the CWA on a 10-day, fact-finding tour to Colombia to investigate
allegations of human rights violations by Coca-Cola. The delegation
issued a scathing report in April concluding that “Coca-Cola
is complicit in human rights abuses of its workers in
Colombia.” (The full report and other supporting information
can be read by going to www.killercoke.org and clicking on the
Monserrate report and appendices.)
The
worldwide Campaign to Stop Killer Coke is mobilizing widespread support
to pressure The Coca-Cola Co. to protect the safety and rights of the
workers and to compensate the victims of the company’s
complicity in human rights abuses.
The
overall strategy entails: 1. Mounting a threat to the image that
Coca-Cola has spent billions of dollars and decades to create.
“Coke’s decision not to investigate possible
union-related murders at its bottlers in Colombia has become a
public-relations nightmare.” (Fortune magazine, May 31,
2004); 2. Cutting out key markets of Coca-Cola. Nine colleges and
universities have removed and banned Coke products from their campuses
and many labor unions and other groups have taken similar actions. 3.
Targeting individual executives and board members (several resignations
of Coke executives and board members have already occurred), and 4.
Challenging Coke’s major financial allies (SunTrust Banks,
Royal Bank of Canada), and winning institutional shareholder support.
(See NYCERS/NYCTRS proxy resolution at http://www.killercoke.org/nycerslet.pdf.)
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Organization
Name: Campaign for a
Commercial-Free Childhood
Contact Information: Josh Golin, Program Manager, 617-278-4172; jgolin@jbcc.harvard.edu
Web Site: http://www.commercialfreechildhood.org
Description: The Campaign For A Commercial-Free Childhood (formerly
Stop Commercial Exploitation of Children) is a national coalition of
health care professionals, educators, advocacy groups and concerned
parents who counter the harmful effects of marketing to children
through action, advocacy, education, research, and collaboration among
organizations and individuals who care about children. CCFC supports
the rights of children to grow up – and the rights of parents
to raise them – without being undermined by rampant
consumerism.
In the midst of an epidemic of childhood obesity, Coca-Cola continues
to target children with their products. Despite their claims that they
do not advertise to children to children under twelve, Coke designs
toys for young children, markets their products extensively in schools
to children of all ages, and it’s product placement is
ubiquitous on American Idol, the number one rated show for children.
Coca-Cola lobbies extensively against polices that policies that would
help combat childhood obesity (such as prohibitions on vending machines
in schools) and even denies the obvious truth that soda is contributing
to health problems for children.
TIAA-CREF has substantial holdings in Coca-Cola.
.................................................................................................................................
Organization
Name: International
Longshore and Warehouse Union
Contact Information: Marcy Rein, Communications Specialist;
415-775-0533, x 120; marcy.rein@ilwu.org
Description: Founded more than 70 years ago in San Francisco, the
International Longshore and Warehouse Union [ILWU] has a proud history
of democracy and international worker solidarity. The ILWU represents
approximately 60,000 members on the West Coast of the U.S. and Canada,
and in Alaska and Hawaii. They work on the docks, on tugboats and
ferries, in warehouses and distribution centers, in hotels and food
processing plants and in myriad other industries.
The 600 workers at Rite Aid’s Southwest Customer Support
Center in Lancaster, CA began organizing in 2006 to join the ILWU. They
were tired of working at will, with no job security; of mandatory
overtime that disrupted their family life; and of working in a building
that had no climate control, subjecting them to blazing heat in summer
and freezing cold in winter.
Rite Aid launched a vicious effort to repress the workers’
organizing. Its union-busting antics led to an investigation by the
National Labor Relations Board, the agency that enforces U.S. labor
law. In May 2007, Rite Aid settled 49 unfair labor practice charges
with Board rather than go to trial. The charges included: Illegally
firing union supporters; illegally demoting pro-union workers;
threatening, discriminating against and coercing union supporters; and
suspending a worker who gave testimony to the NLRB; and spying on union
activities.
Rite Aid also is battling the Service Employees International Union
[1199 SEIU/United Health Care Workers East] and the United Food and
Commercial Workers union [UFCW] over the unions’ rights to
represent workers in the newly acquired Brooks and Eckerd drug stores.
Rite Aid, the third largest drug retail chain in the U.S., has also
faced charges of accounting fraud, consumer fraud and taxpayer fraud.
In the late 1990s the company was caught overstating its profit by $1.6
billion; Rite Aid’s earnings re-statement in July 2000 was
the largest in U.S. history at the time, and several top executives
went to jail. Over the last ten years, Rite Aid has settled numerous
consumer fraud charges for selling expired goods and overcharging
customers; currently the New Jersey Attorney General’s office
has an active case against the company on such charges. In 2004 the
company paid $7 million to the federal government and several states
and signed a Corporate Integrity Agreement with to settle allegations
that it had overcharged Medicaid and other government health programs.
For more information on Rite Aid’s labor relations and other
issues, please visit: http://www.riteaidinsider.com.
.................................................................................................................................
Organization
Name: Sprawl-Busters
Contact
Information: Al Norman, founder.
Web Site :
http://www.sprawl-busters.com/
info@sprawl-busters.com
Description:
Sprawl-Busters, founded in 1993, is a grassroots clearinghouse on
information and strategies for citizens groups fighting the
encroachment of "big box" retail corporations like Wal-Mart, Home
Depot, Target, and Costco. Forbes magazine has called Norman
"Wal-Mart's #1 Enemy." The group's website, sprawl-busters.com,
provides stories from across the globe of citizens' organizing efforts
to stop retail sprawl, and offers resources like books, films and
articles to help win that battle.
"Sprawl-Busters
calls on TIAA-CREF to divest its stock in companies like Wal-Mart and
Costco, which ignore the needs and aspirations of local communities,
destroy local sustainable economies, and profit from the widespread
exploitation of their own workers. " --Al Norman