Tag: Direct Action

Red Alert!

Red: the colour of love, anger … and now a symbol for an exciting product line, aiming to help people in Africa with AIDS.  (Product) Red contains items from various companies, including Gap Inc., Apple Computer Inc., and Emporio Armani.  Some of the eye-catching products include: a red MotoRazr from Motorola, vibrant red shirts from Gap, and a cute red iPod nano. A portion of profits will go to Global Fund, an organization that fights AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria. 

Doug Piwinski, a spokesman for (Product) Red, says the initiative has raised more than $12 million for African AIDS programs, since starting last spring in Britain.

The (Product) Red website also features a gift registry.  What a great way to let people know what you want for Christmas, and give to charity at the same time!

Walmart pays workers $78 million

Friday the 13th turned out to be very lucky for Michelle Braun and Dolores Hummel, both former employees of the popular Wal-Mart Inc. chain. The two workers sued the chain after they were forced to work during their break times. The jury found in favour of current and former employees in Pennsylvania to the tune of $78 million for wages lost between March of 1998 and May of 2006.

This was a blow to Wal-Mart’s already tarnished image. The chain has been accused of treating and paying employees poorly. Mike Donovan, attorney for the two workers, was thrilled with the outcome: “The message of today’s verdict to large retailers is that they can’t say one thing to their employees and do another.”

This is not the first time Wal-Mart has been in hot water, in December a Wal-Mart branch in  Bentonville, Arkansas was ordered to pay $172 million to employees who were denied meal breaks.

Dial-a-Meal

Over at OneWorld South Asia they are running this neat story about a dial-a-meal program:

“Hunger Helpline allows hungry in Gujarat to dial-a-meal. Poor and hungry and living in Gujarat? A meal is just a phone call away, if the state’s food and civil supplies department, which is launching a Hunger Helpline, is to be believed

A novel Hunger Helpline in Gujarat, initiated by the state government in collaboration with civil society organisations (CSOs), aims to connect poor people in need of a meal with food donors through the telephone.

The brainchild of the state’s food and civil supplies department, this first-of-its-kind service aims to ensure than no person in the state goes hungry, either during a natural calamity or even on an ordinary day.”

David Suzuki: Steal my Research

logoDavid Suzuki is awesome and ti add to his awesomeness he has openly proclaimed that anyone can use his research to fight for positive environmental change!

“Allow me to clear something up right now. To all politicians looking for ways to reduce our footprint on nature – or, to use politician-speak, create an “environmental platform”: Knock yourselves out. Feel free to steal, pilfer, borrow, rent, filch or otherwise take any research my foundation does and put it to good use.

This may seem obvious to some, but the whole point of conducting and publishing this research is to get people to actually use it.”