Global News and Analysis

Source: The Nation

Preventing further sexual and economic violence will require a more equitable distribution of resources within the country and the hemisphere.

It’s been four years since Port-au-Prince collapsed, and Haiti’s women are still working through the damage—both physical and mental—left by the catastrophic 2010 earthquake and its aftermath. The cameras and reporters have gone, but the twinned scourges of violence and exploitation continue to haunt Haiti’s ruins.

In the days after the January 12 earthquake, as survivors flooded into cramped displaced people’s camps, sexual assault emerged as a second wave of trauma in the devastated capital city. Though violence against women had been prevalent long before the quake, the disaster left women deeply vulnerable, with little security in the shelters and already-anemic legal protections for victims obliterated. Four years on, despite initial media coverage of Haiti’s “rape epidemic” and overtures of legal reforms, the crumbled social infrastructure has left victims with little recourse and bleak futures. Aid money has washed in and out, but now the spasm of global compassion has ebbed into a stream of predatory “development” schemes. And still, the social fabric continues to corrode under the pressure of entrenched global inequalities, both within the country and across the wealth divide between Global North and South. read more

Source: Truthout

By now you’ve heard that military police in Cambodia killed five garment workers demanding a living wage of $160 per month in the early days of 2014, but only some of this is true.

Here’s a slightly more accurate version: On Tuesday, December 24, during a period of nationwide political unrest, the Cambodian government announced a raise of $15 to garment workers’ monthly minimum wage of $80, for a new total of $95 per month, to start in April, 2014. Workers responded the next day by walking off jobs and demanding the current wage be doubled, for a new monthly wage of $160. read more

Source: Corpwatch

Eight years after they sued Archer Daniels Midland (ADM), Cargill and Nestlé for allegedly forcing them to work as child labor on a Côte d’Ivoire cocoa plantation, three young men from Mali have won a small victory – the ability to be heard in a California court.

The lawsuit was first filed as a class action to represent thousands of former plantation workers in July 2005 by the Washington-based International Labor Rights Fund (ILRF) and Global Exchange, which is based in San Francisco. The non-profit organizations recorded videotape testimony from the three specific individuals who stated that they had been lured across the border between 1994 and 2000 with the promise of easy work and good wages. read more

Source: Al Jazeera

Investigation says loan to Honduran palm oil magnate, alleged to be linked to activist deaths, violated bank’s rules.

An internal World Bank investigation says the bank’s private lending arm violated its own social and environmental rules in approving a $30m loan to a Honduran palm oil magnate allegedly tied to the forced eviction and deaths of dozens of land activists.

The months-long investigation found the bank’s International Finance Corporation (IFC) failed to properly vet Honduran powerbroker Miguel Facusse’s Corporacion Dinant, a palm oil and food giant embroiled in one of Honduras’ deadliest land conflicts in recent history. read more

Source: The Nation

The author’s half-forgotten masterpiece, Benito Cereno, provides fascinating insight into issues of slavery, freedom, individualism—and Islamophobia.

Herman Melville didn’t know that the West African slaves who inspired him to write his other, half-forgotten masterpiece, Benito Cereno, were Muslim. And when I first learned that they were, I didn’t think it more than a curiosity. I was, after all, planning to use the true incident behind the Melville story to open onto a larger history of freedom and slavery during the Age of Revolution, to which Islam seemed incidental. read more

Source: In These Times

Even in the ivory tower, work is often solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.

“She was a professor?” That’s the question an incredulous caseworker asked when confronted with the predicament of Margaret Mary Vojtko, an 83-year-old French teacher who spent the final months of her life destitute and nearly homeless before dying on September 1. The story of her death has become the symbol of a surprising economic reality: “Adjunct professors are the new working poor,” as one CNN headline proclaimed. read more