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NEWSLETTER 14, JULY 2001
Zimbabwe, 1997
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Last year, a CCC researcher went to Zimbabwe to conduct research
on the garment industry. When she arrived at the office of the
national garment union (the NUCI), she immediately was given a
folder with hundreds of letters bulging out of it. It was the
harvest of an urgent appeal letter campaign the Clean Clothes
Campaign initiated three years before, when 20,000 Zimbabwean
workers were fired after a strike. Immediately afterwards, 18,000
were hired again, but put on a temporary contract without many
of the benefits they had before. The 2,000 that were not rehired
were either old or active union members. NUCI said that because
of all the letters that were written to them, the Zimbabwean government
and the multinationals producing for the factory persuaded the
factory to renegotiate with the union. All the workers were rehired
in the end.
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