A new Labor Department report identifies more than 58 countries where child labor or forced labor is used to make hundreds of goods — from coffee grown in Colombia to Christmas decorations made in China — that often end up in the United States.
The government wants American companies and consumers to know about the chance these products are made under conditions in which children and other workers are exploited and abused.
A new US Department of Labor (DOL) report has found that slavery and child labor are still common in the production of popular food ingredients like cocoa and sugar.
Commissioned under legislation passed in 2005, the report sought to uncover the scale of the forced and child labor problem and draft a list of goods produced under conditions that violate international standards.
The newly published report has found 122 goods in 58 countries that are produced using child labor, forced labor or both, including cocoa, sugarcane and coffee.
Children are used to produce everything from pornography in Ukraine to fireworks in the Philippines and diamonds in Sierra Leone, the US Department of Labor said in a report published Thursday.
The report lists 122 goods "produced with forced labor, child labor, or both, in 58 countries" from Afghanistan to North Korea to Uzbekistan.
Children and forced laborers are mining gold, sewing clothing and harvesting cocoa around the world, and India is the source for the biggest number of products made by these workers, a U.S. government report said on Thursday.
The Department of Labor for the first time released a list of goods produced by child or forced labor in foreign countries after Congress told it to compile one. The department looked at 122 products in 58 countries.
Low-wage workers are routinely denied proper overtime pay and are often paid less than the minimum wage, according to a new study based on a survey of workers in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago.
The study, the most comprehensive examination of wage-law violations in a decade, also found that 68 percent of the workers interviewed had experienced at least one pay-related violation in the previous work week.
ELEANOR HALL: Multinational tobacco companies are coming under pressure today for their policy of buying tobacco from farms that exploit children.
An international study has revealed that children working in Malawi's tobacco fields are absorbing up a huge amount of nicotine, the equivalent to smoking 50 cigarettes a day.
Some of these children are less than five and they work for less than 2 cents an hour in oppressive conditions.
Today (Wednesday) is Women's Equality Day, a celebration of the ratification of the 19th Amendment to the Constitution which acknowledged the right of women to vote.
Chocoholics in Australia will soon have a good reason to tuck into a chocolate treat without feeling guilty.
From next year, they will be able to snack with a clear conscience when the nation's most popular chocolate bar, Cadbury Dairy Milk, becomes Fairtrade certified.
The move will quadruple the amount of cocoa bought from west Africa under sustainable farming schemes and help end child labour and trafficking.