Workers' Rights: In March, the Guggenheim issued a...

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Workers' Rights: Is Ikea's U.S. Factory One Big, Fat, Racist, Modern-Day Sweatshop?

× Like us and you'll find top breaking news in your Facebook newsfeed. Sign up for our daily email newsletter and get top stories and breaking news delivered to your inbox. Monday, April 11, 2011, by Sarah Firshein

Photo via L.A. Times

The first American Ikea factory, located in Danville, Va., has recently come under attack for a variety of terrible, horrible, no good, very bad things ranging from forcing overtime work upon its 335 employees to mandating when they can take eight of their 12 allotted vacation days. In addition, despite the fact that the furniture chain's Swedwood factories in Sweden are unionized, workers in Virginia have been required attend meetings where they've been scared out of forming a union. Topping it all off are six black workers who have filed discrimination complaints with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission for being continually assigned overnight shifts in the lowest-paying departments. (Swedwood just settled one for a paltry $2,000.) Still, maintains one of the plant's Sweden-based union leaders, "Ikea is a very strong brand and they lean on some kind of good Swedishness in their business profile. That becomes a complication when they act like they do in the United States." Another spokesperson called the situation "sad." Here's a word of advice, guys: being racist and treating employees without dignity is more than just a "complication," and it's more than just "sad."

· Ikea's U.S. factory churns out unhappy workers [L.A. Times via Boing Boing]

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Dwelling: Where Martin Luther King, Jr. and Other Civil Rights Leaders Lived

× Like us and you'll find top breaking news in your Facebook newsfeed. Sign up for our daily email newsletter and get top stories and breaking news delivered to your inbox. Monday, January 17, 2011, by Sarah

In honor of Martin Luther King, Jr., we here at Curbed HQ decided to blog all day. We also thought it appropriate to explore his birthplace, a two-story Queen Anne-style house in the Sweet Auburn neighborhood of Atlanta. The residence, with front and side porches, scroll-cut woodwork trim, and two porthole windows, was where King lived from his birth, in 1929, to 1941. But what about his fellow civil-rights leaders? We take a look at some benchmark houses in American history after the jump.

? This unassuming brick house in Rochester, N.Y., is where women's-rights champion Susan B. Anthony lived from 1866 to her death, in 1906. Although it's not her birthplace (she's a Massachusetts native), it was in the front parlor, in 1872, that the U.S. Deputy Marshal arrested her for voting. She was fined $100 but never paid it.

? Civil-rights leader W.E.B Du Bois was born in 1868 in Great Barrington, Mass.; after much controversy, his birthplace was memorialized in 2008 by the University of Massachusetts, who owns the land. Above: the Queens, N.Y., home where Du Bois and Shirley Graham wed in 1951 and then lived until they moved to Brooklyn. As of 2008, the NAACP was fighting to get it registered as a landmarked place.

Photo: Patrick Henson/Flickr
? Shortly after her birth, a young Rosa Parks moved to her grandparents' 260-acre farm in Abbeville, Ala. In 1944, she returned to Henry County to as a representative of the NAACP to investigate rape charges brought on by a black woman.

? In March 1973, Harvey Milk and his partner, Scott Smith, moved into the second-floor apartment at 575 Castro Street in San Francisco and opened a camera shop on the ground floor. The building soon became the center of activity for an increasingly activist neighborhood; it's where Milk, the so-called "Mayor of Castro Street," developed into a local politician and pioneer for gay rights.

· Martin Luther King Jr. National Historic Site [National Park Service]
· Online Tours [Susan B. Anthony House]
· House where civil-rights leader W.E.B. Du Bois lived not landmarked [NYDN]
· Harvey Milk - 30 Years Later [The Castro]

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