HARRISBURG — State environmental officials didn’t account for half the waste pumped into injection disposal wells last year, a comparison with federal data shows.

The state’s injection wells took 330,000 barrels of waste left over after natural gas drilling last year, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. That’s about six truckloads a day.

The state Department of Environmental Protection only accounted for 167,500 barrels, according to its records.

That means about three truckloads of waste per day are unaccounted for in the state’s tracking system.

The discrepancy “begs the question of whether Pennsylvania should let the industry expand,” said Nadia Steinzor, eastern program coordinator for Earthworks Action, an environmental watchdog.

Hillary Clinton is finally campaigning in Iowa but at least one other potential Democratic rival is making contact with activists in the early caucus state as well.

Vermont senator Bernie Sanders is holding a conference call with Iowa Democrats on Thursday night. In an email obtained by the Guardian, Phil Fiermonte, a political aide to Sanders, wrote: “This would be for Bernie to update people about his presidential race decision making and for him to hear from you.”

Although the initial email described the call as tentative, simply saying “Bernie is thinking about organizing a conference call with a number of leaders in Iowa who we have met this past year,” Fiermonte confirmed that the call was happening. He said that Sanders “wants to hear from [Iowans] about what they are thinking and hearing and seeing on the ground”.

Sanders, a self-described socialist, has long been pondering a run for the Democratic nomination despite being an independent. (He does caucus with the Democrats on Capitol Hill, voting with them and is considered a Democrat in terms of seniority and committee membership.) Sanders has made several trips to Iowa and New Hampshire in the past year and has been courting liberal activists in those crucial states, the first and second to choose their Democratic presidential candidate in 2016.
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A small news item in the Mumbai Mirror in late October caught my attention. A zipper sweatshop in the city of Ghatkopar was the home of several young boys who were routinely beaten and tortured by the owner. The story quoted an 11-year-old rescued from the sweatshop. Speaking about owner Rajdeep Chaudhary, the boy said:

He used to hit the other two boys with a thick stick. Just like me he did not take them to a doctor even when they were bleeding badly. Finally one day last month, the two boys somehow managed to escape from the factory. Chaudhary did not even bother to look for them, but he started locking me up during the nights after that.

The boys in this sweatshop worked 16-hour days, were rarely fed and even starved, and lived in horrible conditions all too common in the global apparel industry. Such conditions are, if anything, encouraged in the industry by the multinational corporations who have long looked to avoid responsibility for their actions by outsourcing and subcontracting work to ever poorer nations.

Without a system of global accountability for American corporations contracting in other nations, such horrors will continue to occur.

We as labor activists must begin to think about how to build international labor solidarity by fighting for legislation that would create this accountability—specifically giving workers around the world the right to sue in American courts if companies or their subcontractors violated basic labor rights such as workplace violence, avoiding paying a nation’s minimum wage, or pollution discharges that sicken and kill people.