As governments prepare for the December 15-17 WTO ministerial meeting in Geneva, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, Olivier De Schutter, has issued a series of recommendations for overhauling world trade rules if governments are to fulfill their obligation to ensure the right to food in an increasingly hungry world.

On 26 November 2011, 39 long-term casual workers received their permanent appointment letters at the Coca-Cola bottling plant in Lahore.This is part of the ongoing negotiations by the Coca-Cola unions in the IUF-affiliated National Federation of Food, Beverages and Tobacco Workers (NFFBTW), to increase the proportion of permanent jobs and reduce precarious work at Coca-Cola Pakistan’s six bottling plants.

Contract workers claiming their rights at Nestlé's dairy factory in Kabirwala, Pakistan have been punished with the loss of their jobs and jailed by the score on fabricated charges as management seeks to criminalize the union's struggle in support of permanent jobs for contract workers.

What follows is the content of an e-mail from James Ritchie, National Secretary of the NZDWU to Hector Ponce, General Secretary of ATILRA and Oscar Marozzi, Assistant General Secretary of ATILRA following the meeting of the informal leadership group of the dairy division of the IUF in NZ, 16-18 November 2011. Due to a series of problems with Argentinean airspace, the ATILRA delegation was unable to attend the meeting.

The 24-hour national strike called jointly by the Portuguese trade union confederations UGTP and CGTP halted public services and factories in many parts of Portugal on 24 November. Workers chanting "let the banks pay" marched against austerity measures imposed by the government as a condition of the EU/IMF bailout.

“They can take away the tarps and the tents. But they can’t slow down the Occupy Wall Street movement!”, said AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka after the first police raids on the protestors' camp. The union has called on workers, union and non-union, to respect the Occupy encampments as they would a picket line.

On November 22 the National Union of Workers announced that an agreement had been reached on favorable terms to the NUW members on strike at Baiada Poultry, Australia's largest poultry producer and the main supplier to retail giant Coles. The agreement brings equal pay rates for all workers at the factory, the key issue in the strike.

According to the NUW:

Now every worker at Baiada in Laverton will be paid site rates 

No more cash in hand. No more $10!

Your redundancy payments have more than doubled.

A capacity for aggression at Nestlé, the world's largest food company, is not limited to the aggressive pursuit of market share and aggressive cash flow management, qualities praised by investors and envied by competitors. It applies equally to industrial relations, where it receives considerably less attention. Violations of worker rights predictably make less headline noise than the latest quarterly results, a hefty dividend increase or the successful launch of a new product.

As new details emerge about the process of transfer of PepsiCo bottling operations in China to Tingyi, workers there found out about the devil in this detail. And that devil is evil enough to make workers take very courageous steps of protest. According to recent press reports, workers in three locations protested against the company's plan in what obviously is a coordinated action in a country that denies basic union rights - that is the right to independent unions -  to its citizens.

At the November 8 meeting of the Nestlé European Works Council in Geneva, Switzerland, representatives of twenty Nestlé unions from across Europe collectively called on the company to immediately halt attacks on trade union rights in Indonesia and in Pakistan. The unions insisted that Nestlé reinstate the dismissed trade union members in Indonesia and ensure their livelihoods and halt all harassment of trade unionists in Pakistan.