JAPAN: The IMF-affiliated Japan Council of Metalworkers’ Unions (IMF-JC) has decided that for the second year running it will not seek a unified basic monthly pay raise for its member unions during the “shunto” wage talks next spring. The 2.5 million-strong IMF-JC, a major pacesetter for wage negotiations in Japan, has announced that its priority for 2003 collective bargaining with management will be placed on safeguarding and stabilising jobs, as was the case for the 2002 wages talks. The president of the IMF-JC, Katsutoshi Suzuki, told a trade union committee meeting that he could not find “a rationale for pushing a unified demand on the scope of a basic pay raise when the trend in prices and expanding differences among the earnings performances of various companies are taken into account.” Both the IMF-JC and the Rengo trade union confederation have said they will opt for a demand that trade union members be given a monthly wage increase linked to an increase in age. The unemployment rate in Japan hit a record high of 5.5 per cent in October. Last April, the IMF-JC participated in a massive two-day trade union march and rally to protest against government economic and labour policies and to demand urgent measures by the government to stimulate the economy and improve employment opportunties.

Finally, the Italian government, led by its incompetent ministers of industry and labour, has openly shown that Big Capital is the only sector of society that it wants to represent. 8,100 Fiat workers in all plants in Italy will not have a job to go to on Monday, December 9, and 2,400 of these workers will never get it back again. 5,700 will be on technical unemployment insurance without any guarantee to go back to work. The deal signed by Fiat and the Berlusconi government is the final act to the dismantling of the Italian auto industry. Instead of taking this opportunity to relaunch an extensive industrial project based on production of automobiles that would have benefited people in both the south and north of Italy, the government and the company have preferred to send positive signals to the shareholders by implementing a ruthless programme that will throw thousands of workers and their families into poverty. We shouldn’t forget that Fiat, being a very important conglomerate, has dictated industrial policy in Italy. In the past, Fiat received enormous amounts of funds from the Italian government and from European regional funds to set up plants in the south of Italy. Now the funds are finished, which is why Fiat is no longer interested. For the first time ever, an agreement which concerns workers has been reached by a company and the government without the trade unions. The government’s claim that trade unions were consulted is a lie. What happened was that Fiat and the government first reached an agreement as to how to use the funds from unemployment insurance and than submitted the same to the unions. All three unions together and in unison rejected the proposal and protested against the way this important issue has been dealt with. Today, December 6, when the workers at all Fiat plants are on strike, we at the IMF want to express our solidarity with the workers of Fiat and let them know that we support their struggle.

PORTUGAL: The International Metalworkers’ Federation fully supports its Portuguese affiliate, the Sindicato das Industrias Metalurgicas e Afins (SIMA), in its call for a 24-hour national general strike on Tuesday, December 10. The reasons for this industrial action are:

• government intransigence regarding its intentions to impose changes in the labour law via a new Labour Code;
• the reduction in purchasing power due to the general hike in prices and government limitations on wage increases;
• government intentions to change the Social Security Law.

In what seems to be the broadest attacks against workers’ and trade union rights in many years in Portugal, SIMA says that the proposed revisions in the Labour Code and Social Security Law are “totally unacceptable and go against what SIMA has being fighting for during its 25 years of existence.” The IMF and its 25 million metalworker members worldwide wish SIMA every success in its general strike.

ITALY: Following the collapse of talks on Thursday, December 5, concerning Fiat’s massive jobs-cut plan and union refusal of a government compromise, 8-hour strikes have been called for today (Friday, December 6) in all Fiat plants and related companies. The strikes are the latest in a series of protests over Fiat Auto’s restructuring plan in which it has announced it will make redundant 8,100 autoworkers, or one-fifth of its domestic workforce, through a one-year layoff scheme. With the breakdown in the negotiations, Fiat will put in action the first wave of layoffs, affecting 5,600 workers (5,000 in car assembly jobs and 600 in components), as of Monday, December 9. Expressing the IMF’s full solidarity with Fiat workers and their unions, Marcello Malentacchi, IMF general secretary, states in his latest opinion column that the government and Fiat “preferred to send positive signals to the shareholders by implementing a ruthless programme that will throw thousands of workers and their families into poverty.” (See the full text of this opinion column on the IMF website under “IMF Opinion”.) One of the auto plants to be hardest hit is in Termini Imerese, on the island of Sicily, where Fiat has long been the mainstay for production jobs, and where unemployment is already at 25 per cent of the working population. As of December 9, 1,800 workers at the Termini plant will be on temporary layoff with minimum pay. After government intervention, Fiat has said the plant would open in January for five weeks, to finish off some manufacturing, but will close again until next September and cannot say how many workers will be needed then. Fiat workers throughout Europe are organising rallies on December 16 to insist on demands that Fiat invest in development rather than cut jobs.

UKRAINE/RUSSIA: In conjunction with IMF-affiliated national trade unions in Ukraine and Russia, the IMF’s Project Office for the CIS held two workshops on education, one in Kiev in October and the other in Moscow in November. Some 90 participants from Ukraine and 120 from Russia, representing union leaders and future trade union trainers, took part in the respective workshops, which participants say play an important role in strengthening unity and solidarity within and among the unions. Participating in the workshop in Ukraine were the Automobile and Agricultural Machinery Workers’ Union, the Professional Union of Radioelectronic Workers’ Trade Unions, and the Central Council of Trade Unions of Defence Industry Workers. Taking part in the workshop in Russia were the Miners and Metallurgical Workers’ Union, the Mechanical Engineering Workers’ Union, the Shipbuilding Workers’ Union and the All Russian Defence Industry Workers’ Union. The Project Office reports that since the start of the transition period in Central and Eastern Europe most of the traditional national trade union centers in these countries have not been able to provide the necessary trade union training to meet their own education needs. Thus, unions in the sub-region are making efforts to set up their own education structures. In this connection, Russian and Ukrainian metalworker unions have requested IMF assistance for training union trainers, with projects expected to get underway in 2003. The Russian unions will be assisted by the IMF’s German and Norwegian affiliates, IG Metall and Fellesforbundet, and working with the Ukrainians will be IG Metall, France’s FO-Metaux, and the Swiss metalworkers’ union SMUV/FTMH.

FINLAND: Members of the Finnish Metalworkers’ Union have accepted the results of collective bargaining negotiations between the union and the national employers’ organisation FIMET. The new two-year agreement is based on the comprehensive incomes policy settlement and will be valid from February 1, 2003, to February 15, 2005. The contract provides for wage increases (in euros) of 25 cents per hour in 2003, but not less than 2.6 per cent, and in 2004 the increase will be 17 cents, but not less than 1.8 per cent. Additionally, in 2004, there will be a union-specific element amounting to 4 cents. The new agreement will also include several qualitative improvements, regarding employment of trainees, training and financial compensation for health and safety representatives, and the possibility for parents to take care of sick children. The Finnish Metalworkers’ Union succeeded to negotiate agreements for eight sectors out of nine. Only the repair workshops for the mechanical forest industry are not included as this sector will follow the agreement for the mechanical forest industry.

GENEVA / MOSCOW: The IMF has launched a Russian-language website, targeting trade unionists in the republics of the former Soviet Union and the Baltic states. From the outset, the site contains a regularly updated news section, information about the IMF, affiliates’ addresses, event information, link collection, contact possibilities, and a publications page from which important IMF documents – like the IMF Action Programme and Rules – can be downloaded. “IMF affiliates in these regions have long anticipated this website. They badly lack unbiased information about international trade union issues, and this IMF initiative will help them in this respect,” says Svetla Shekerdjieva at the IMF Project Office in Moscow. As not many workers in the region have access to the Internet, the website is primarily aimed at trade union officials at national and regional level and at large enterprises. But Internet access is gaining ground, and Svetla Shekerdjieva exemplifies this with a recent IMF educational seminar in Russia, where every second delegate claimed to have access to the Internet. IMF affiliates in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia organise more than 4 million members. Note: The address to the new web section is www.imfmetal.org/cis. The IMF also produces a regional website for Latin America and the Caribbean, address www.imfmetal.org/fitim.

FINLAND: Trade Union News from Finland reports that, in the second quarter of 2002, wages of men in Finnish industry were 24 per cent higher than those of women. The relative gender gap was equally large in the fourth quarter of 1998. In the metal and electronics industry, men’s hourly pay is 13.26 euros for the second quarter of 2002, as compared to women’s hourly pay of 11.13 euros in the same industry. Men’s average pay per hour in Finland is 13.87 euros, and women’s average pay is 11.16 euros.

AUSTRALIA: According to the national daily newspaper, The Australian, the Australian car industry is setting up a A$1 million (US$559,875) fighting fund to take on unions through the courts as it tries to convince the federal government to grant a A$2 billion (US$ 1.12 billion) handout to the sector. The fund has been jointly developed by the Federated Chamber of Automotive Industries and the Federation of Automotive Products Manufacturers, which represent Ford, Holden, Toyota, Mitsubishi and hundreds of smaller components firms. Use of the fund would be triggered when a union engages in what the car industry calls illegal strike action. The IMF-affiliated Australian Manufacturing Workers’ Union says the news article reinforces how seriously the government is working with major car and car components companies to destroy the bargaining strength of workers in the Australian car industry. It appears it has been run to prepare the public for the release of a government report that will seek to blame unions for problems facing the industry. Since 1999, and in the face of significant anti-union penal provisions, the AMWU has been building a strategy to line up separate enterprise agreements with similar or the same expiry dates. The objective of this strategy is to prevent employers from forcing downwards bargaining by isolating workers from each other in the bargaining process.

GREAT BRITAIN: “Our little girls won’t wait 40 years for women’s pay to catch up.” Thus, as part of the struggle against pay injustice in the UK, Amicus MSF Section says it is taking its campaign for equal pay straight to the doors of the employers’ association, the Confederation of British Industry (CBI), when it holds its conference in Manchester this Sunday, November 24. And demonstrating along with the union will be 18 young girls and their families – the 18 girls representing the 18 per cent pay gap which still exists between men and women, even though it has been 31 years since the UK’s Equal Pay Act was passed. Amicus MSF Section says that the girls’ message to the CBI is that they don’t intend to wait a lifetime for equal pay. According to the union, these young women would have to wait approximately 40 years for equal pay with men if the gender pay gap is left to close at its current rate. The union has strongly condemned the CBI for its refusal to endorse the call for mandatory equal pay reviews – which would expose employers with discriminatory pay practices – and says that it is the most effective means for achieving a significant reduction in the pay gap between men and women. Only 10 per cent of employers in the UK have agreed to the union’s demand for voluntary equal pay reviews.