By Steven Thomma

A labor-rights advocacy group asked the U.S. government Thursday to ban

imports of cocoa from Ivory Coast, saying a new investigation revealed that little

had been done to stop the use of child slave labor in its harvesting.

The group, the Washington-based International Labor Rights Fund, asked the

Customs Service to invoke a 1997 law that prohibits imports of any good

"produced or manufactured with bonded child labor." The group said the only

May 17, 2002

"Our research shows that the US imports Kenyan coffee processed by women who suffer routinely from violent sexual abuse by their employers and supervisors. Even their daughters, who live with them on the agricultural plantations, have been raped. Senator Baucus' amendment to the Fast Track bill will help Americans say no to such practices and help working women protect themselves," says Natacha Thys, Director of the International Labor Rights Fund's (ILRF) Rights for Working Women Campaign.

By Steven Greenhouse

BIRMINGHAM, Ala., March 19 -- Decades ago, Alabama's mining companies had more than their share of battles with the mine workers' union. In one confrontation, the National Guard shot a pro-union minister to death in 1921. In recent years, however, Alabama coal fields have been peaceful.

"Flowers," wrote Goethe, "are the beautiful words and hieroglyphs of nature, with which she shows us how much she loves us." Then again, he never had to make a living by picking them.

Up on the high plains of the Savanna region around the Colombian capital of Bogota, you get a different view. Here flowers are hieroglyphs not of nature, but of exploitation. "For me flowers mean hard work, bad conditions and bad health," says Elida Duarte, a 29-year-old flower picker working for the Dole corporation, which now controls one fifth of Colombia's exports...