Looks like the unpaid internship scam has gone global. Electronics manufacturing giant Foxconn admits that it discovered underage “interns” working in its factory:

 BEIJING (AP) — Electronics manufacturer Foxconn said Tuesday it found underage interns as young as 14 working at one of its factories in China. Foxconn Technology Group said the interns were found by a company investigation at its factory in the eastern city of Yantai and were sent back to their schools. China’s minimum legal working age is 16. Foxconn, owned by Taiwan’s Hon Hai Precision Industry Co., is best known as the manufacturer of Apple Inc.’s iPhone but said the Yantai factory had no connection with its work for Apple.

The labor rights group China Labor Watch said in a statement that Foxconn was remiss for not verifying the ages of its interns.

Local authorities have long been accused of colluding with Foxconn to steer cheap labor to the factories. The fact that the underage interns came in through a “vocational program” run by a local school adds weight to these suspicions. 

• Thirty-three people died of listeria from tainted cantaloupes last year after a private for-profit inspection company awarded the source farm the highest safety grade. Most of America’s food supply is vetted by private inspectors, who operate without federal standards.
• An in-house commentator for the LA Kings, one of the finest hockey journalists of his generation, was forced out of his job by the National Hockey League for interviewing a representative of the NHL Players’ Association during the lockout. 
• Joel Klein, the former chancellor of the NYC Department of Education and a tireless promoter of standardized testing, embellished the memoir he used to bolster his claims that teachers can single-handedly lift children out of poverty, Richard Rothstein reports in the American Prospect.
• As iPhone 5 sales surge, assembly workers are protesting their working conditions. Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! interviews Li Qiang of China Labor Watch.

[Photo credit: Wander Mule, Creative Commons.]

Sasha Chavkin, Anna Maria Barry-Jester, and Ronnie Greene of the Center for Public Integrity for Mystery in the Fields, a multi-part investigation into an international public health crisis. 

A new kind of kidney disease is and killing thousands of people on multiple continents. The victims are primarily young men, typically farm workers who toil in extreme heat. They are sugarcane cutters in Central America, rice farmers in India, and coconut harvesters in Sri Lanka. They are the breadwinners of their families. When fathers die of the disease, their teen sons are forced into the fields, only to succumb themselves within a few years. 

Nobody knows what causes the disease, dubbed CKDu for “chronic kidney disease of unidentified origin,” but its incidence has tripled since the 1990s. Experts suspect that a deadly combination of pesticides and dehydration are to blame, but powerful agribusiness interests are pushing hard to discredit that explanation. 

Read my interview with Sasha Chavkin in The Backstory.

Walmart workers in several stores walked off the job in protest today. This is the first multi-store strike in the retailer’s 50-year history:

Today, for the first time in Walmart’s fifty-year history, workers at multiple stores are out on strike. Minutes ago, dozens of workers at Southern California stores launched a one-day work stoppage in protest of alleged retaliation against their attempts to organize. In a few hours, they’ll join supporters for a mass rally outside a Pico Rivera, CA store. This is the latest – and most dramatic – of the recent escalations in the decades-long struggle between organized labor and the largest private employer in the world.

“I’m excited, I’m nervous, I’m scared…” Pico Rivera Walmart employee Evelin Cruz told Salon yesterday about her decision to join today’s strike. “But I think the time has come, so they take notice that these associates are tired of all the issues in the stores, all the management retaliating against you.” Rivera, a department manager, said her store is chronically understaffed: “They expect the work to be done, without having the people to do the job.” [Salon]

As Josh Eidelson of Salon explains, this is a risky move because the workers do not yet belong to a union. Even so, federal labor law protects the right of non-union workers to walk off the job to protest the conditions of their employment. The workers can’t be fired for striking. What’s less clear is whether the company could bring in scabs to replace the if the strike continues.

Eidelson interviewed historian Nelson Lichtenstein, the author of a book on unions and Walmart, and a past winner of the Hillman Foundation’s Sol Stetin Award. Lichtenstein predicts that, if the strike gains momentum, the company will be constrained more by PR concerns than by the letter of the labor law.

Today’s action is organized by OUR Walmart, an employee organization supported by the United Food and Commercial Workers. 

[Photo credit: A demonstration against Walmart’s labor practices taken earlier this month, peoplesworld, Creative Commons.]