Excuse me, who trains who?”
The United States, together with Australia, Brunei Darussalam, Fiji, India, Indonesia, Japan, the Republic of Korea, Malaysia, New Zealand, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam launched the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework (IPEF) on 23 May 2022. The 14 IPEF partners represent 40 per cent of the global Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and 28 percent of global goods and services trade.
The US claims IPEF is worker-centric and comes with the Upskillings Initiative to provide training to girls and women in IPEF countries. However, the Initiative involves 14 big technology companies in the US which have been involved in a series of labour rights violations in their practices.
This briefer collects information and tracks the labour practices of five big US technology corporations: Amazon, Google LLC, Apple Inc, Microsoft, and IBM, as some examples among others. Each company briefer includes details about the size of the company, nature of business operations, its headquarters, as well as its revenue from the most recent publicly available records. The paper also investigates the human rights commitments and policies of each company, including commitments to international norms. More importantly, we briefly examine some of the most significant and recent issues in the labour practices of each company. It is imperative to note that the cases of harassment, forced labour and wage theft in these companies are not singular or anomalies. These actions are part of a systemic and institutional hierarchy operating in an imperialist and neoliberal economy.
For more information, please visit our full reading here.
