labour rights

This article takes a look at where our hardware comes from, the electronics factories situated in primarily Asian countries, and the challenges facing the people, primarily women, who work there, and the issues that impact upon women workers in the electronics industry. Ten facts about your computer that illuminate the gendered nature of the labour that is embedded in our hardware.

The GISWatch report 2016 looks at the link between economic, social, cultural (ESC) rights and the internet in several countries, and from a multitude of systems of governance, whether that of socialism and the welfare state, or the semi-functional welfare schemes in parts of Asia and Africa (Uganda, Cambodia), and even the relatively privileged parts of the world, like Spain. Here is a synthesis…

Economic, social, cultural rights in international law is a recognition of the basic rights of all people to a fundamentally decent and happy life - one in which their right to self-determination is respected. Does the progressively digitised future threaten or cement a world where ESC rights are guaranteed for all? In this editorial, Nadine Moawad states that the network is good and the network…

Do internet campaigns work? This is what Alexandra Demetrianova reflects upon in her research for GISWatch about labour rights violations in garment factories of Cambodia. The internet has played a key role in the struggles of garment factory workers (mostly female) and trade unionists to demand for an increase in their minimum wage. It has also helped change consumer consciousness across the…

This month's column by Sonia Randhawa looks at intersections between ICTs, gender and climate change through the lens of the women working in the software, rather than the hardware side of things. While many of the big companies in North America have taken steps to ensure that the energy for data processing comes from renewable sources, the question remains what is the environmental impact and…

What is the connection between labour unions, women workers and climate change? This monthly column on connecting the dots between climate change and gender, explores the exploitative conditions that are still prevalent in the electronics industry. While workers in Pearl River delta in China may no longer face sweatshop conditions, the production has shifted to other poorer parts and most often…

In Seoul for the Asia Europe Foundation's Informal Meeting on Human Rights, looking at human rights and ICTs, I made a few extra-curricular stops - it was hard not to, when just outside our hotel is an ongoing protest about labour rights. The protest site has obviously been occupied for some time - they are even growing tomato plants - and is just outside a major tourist attraction. The protest…