"Tire Giant Firestone Hit with Lawsuit over Slave-Like Conditions"

[GreenPartyVoter]

UNITED NATIONS - Firestone, a multinational rubber manufacturing giant known for its automobile tires, has come under fire from human rights and environmental groups for its alleged use of child labor and slave-like working conditions at a plantation in Liberia.

Recently, the International Labor Rights Fund (ILRF), a Washington, D.C.-based advocacy group, filed a lawsuit charging that thousands of workers, including minors, toil in virtual slavery at Bridgestone's Firestone rubber plantation in Liberia.

According to the complaint filed in the United States District Court in Venice, California, Firestone, which has operated in the West African country since the 1920s, largely depends on poor and often illiterate workers to tap tons of raw latex from rubber trees using primitive tools exposing them to hazardous pesticides and fertilizers.

At Firestone, "all of the workers are poverty-stricken Africans, enduring extremely inhuman conditions under the constant guard of American and now Japanese overseers who live in the finest houses in Liberia, looking down on the field hands from their verandahs and the company's private golf course," the group says.

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/1208-07.htm

[FormerRepublican]

1. This story is totally disgraceful.

No doubt they're angry because they haven't been able to turn the US into that kind of profit maker yet, too.

If that's not a reason to boycott Firestone, then I don't know what is.

[GreenPartyVoter]

2. That's what I am thinking too. Time to shame the scum.

[GreenPartyVoter]

3. Kick--where are my fellow slave labor haters?

[rurallib]

4. I am so old that I remember when working at Firestone

was a job that was very desirable and well-paid. Plus their products were THE top of the line. One of thousands of American companies that could be said about.

[GreenPartyVoter]

5. Can't say that much any more

[Xenotime]

6. Every big business runs sweatshops....

so their heirs can appear on dating shows.

[knitter4democracy]

7. Oh. My. God.

Just when you think we've dealt with something, it comes right back and bites us in the ass.

Disgusting.

[chat_noir]

8. kick

:kick: