I've talked (ranted?) about this subject before: the modeling industry's exploitation, and occasional destruction, of 14-year-old girls.  A new documentary by model-turned-Cornell student Sara Ziff, shot over a five-year period, looks like it will give audiences a girl's-eye view of the industry.  Their view is not necessarily pretty. 

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A great profile from the Womens Feature Service about Kalpona Akter, the head of the Bangladesh Center for Workers Solidarity (BCWS).

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It appears that major retailers such as the Gap have forced the Uzbek government to agree to stop forcing children out of school and into the cotton fields, says the Guardian.  A report to be released tomorrow by the Environmental Justice Foundation will lay out the current situation in Uzbekistan and what is being done about it. 

Cotton brings a billion dollars annually to the Uzbek government, one of the most brutal and repressive governments in the world.  It regularly "employs" child laborers to harvest the "white gold," if by "employ" we mean forcing them to work 12 hour days in blazing heat and then collapse from sunstroke. 

Global retailers are getting involved as new technology makes it possible to trace the blended cotton used in garment manufacturing back to its multiple sources.  Thus, retailers can say "no thanks" with confidence to garments made from Uzbek cotton, even though it's been blended with cotton from other sources. 

Environmental Justice Foundation has a good background on the problems with cotton here.

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Wal-Mart has reached a deal with the Nassau County, New York District Attorney to avoid criminal prosecution for the fatal trampling of a store security guard in the 2008 holiday sales. 

While the megastore admitted no wrongdoing, it agreed to review its security and crowd-control measures to ensure the horrific events are not repeated in future low, low priced frenzies. 

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The business school at Edinburgh University is launching a service to provide firms with like-for-like carbon emissions comparison data.

Carbon ENDS, as the service is called, is run by Craig Mackenzie, a senior lecturer at the school. They will be taking groups of companies by sector and producing company funded peer-group comparisons. The first report, due this month, compares companies in the UK supermarket sector.

The service builds on the university's work in running an MSc in climate change, and their work in developing an MSc in carbon finance. MBA students and undergraduates are also able to take an optional course in climate change.

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A great post from AdAge on Metric Madness criticizes the mathematical predelicitions of today's managers, at the expense of complexity.

It focuses on marketing but could be applied to practically any discipline taught at business school.

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Responsible investment firm Trillium Asset Management is calling on Warren Buffett's group to produce a sustainability report.

The investment manager has joined forces with the International Labor Rights Forum ("ILRF") and International Rivers to convince other investors to support the resolution filed by Berkshire shareholder Joseph G. Petrofsky.

Berkshire's social and environmental performance has come in for criticism. Elsewhere on APEsphere you can find coverage, for example, of Berkshire's Russell Athletic division.

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Starbucks is going Fair Trade in the UK, so is Cadbury.  Their U.S. counterparts aren't.  What's up with that?

This piece in CS Monitor pretty much sums it up:

"more than 70 percent of the British populace recognize the fair-trade mark, whereas consumer recognition in the United States is only 28 percent, according to recent surveys."

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Australia is to introduce new laws to curb excessive executive pay, the country's finance minister announced.

Treasurer Wayne Swan has said that "shareholder approval will be required for termination payouts of more than one year's base pay", according to a report in the Sydney Morning Herald.

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