AUSTRALIA: For the second time in one month, some 4,300 workers at Australia’s biggest car manufacturer, Holden, have taken strike action in support of their demands for a pay increase. Workers, who once again downed their tools on August 30 at the company’s assembly plant in Elizabeth, have declared that management’s offer during wage negotiations of 15.1 per cent for the coming three years is “an insult”. The unions initially claimed 24 per cent and are ready to accept 20 per cent.
This is the first time in ten years that Holden workers have resorted to strike action in order to settle a dispute. A spokesperson for the Australian Manufacturing Workers’ Union stated that Holden workers “believe they have made the company No. 1, they have made possible exports to the Middle East and elsewhere, and they have made the company big profits. Workers view the offer as an insult.”
The company, an affiliate of General Motors, produces 580 cars a day. The strike has halted production of the Series II VX Commodore, which is Australia’s biggest selling car, and the WH Stateman, which is exported to the Middle East with Chevrolet badging.

AUSTRALIA: The national president of the Australian Manufacturing Workers’ Union, Julius Roe, has called on the Australian community to reject “the dangerous wedge politics” the prime minister, John Howard, is playing with regard to the Tampa refugee crisis. “The Howard government’s denial of entry to these asylum seekers further demonstrates the hallmarks of this government: heartless, uncompassionate, mean and out of touch.”
Roe says that the AMWU respects and supports the humanitarian stance taken by the captain of the MS Tampa. “His actions have been the most humane and understanding of all the parties involved in this wrangle.”
Neither Australian nor international law requires refugees to have papers to enter a country when they are fleeing for their lives. Roe says that “the 450 asylum seekers on the Tampa, predominantly from Iraq and Afganistan, are without proper shelter or care. The ship is built for a crew of 30 – not 450. The refugees are in desperate need of medical treatment and a safe haven. Australia has an obligation under international law to allow the Tampa to dock as part of the obligation for ships to render assistance to those in distress.”
Is John Howard going to declare war on Norway in order to avoid international obligations, asks Roe?

PAKISTAN: The Pakistan Wapda Hydro-Electric Central Labour Union (PWHECLU), a member of the IMF-affiliated All Pakistan Federation of Trade Unions, has expressed its concern over deaths due to inadequate safety measures for workers at the Water and Power Development Authority (Wapda). On August 29, the union sent once again its condolences, this time to the family of Mubarik Ali Shah, a lineman at the company, whose accidental death was due to the lack of proper safety gear.
The PWHECLU has urged the Wapda management to ensure that the necessary safety equipment is always available for workers on duty and also directed the line workmen not to carry out their work without making certain that the necessary precautions to guarantee their safety have been taken.
The union requested management to make an immediate payment of dues to the bereaved family of Mubarik Ali.

NORTH AMERICA: In a Labour Day statement by Leo Gerard, international president of the 700,000-member United Steelworkers of America, he asks: “Is Labour Day being devalued?” What should be celebrated on Labour Day, asks the USWA president? “The fact that — more often than not — both parents must work to make ends meet? That they have to work many more hours a week? That real wages declined for 17 of the past 20 years? That nearly a million manufacturing jobs across North America have been wiped out in this year alone?”
More and more multinational companies are transferring their production abroad unless workers accept concessions and, states Gerard, “nowhere is the hypocrisy of today’s environment more apparent than in the crisis that so-called ‘free trade’ has imposed on workers in the North American steel industry, where prices collapsed during the Asian financial crisis and have never recovered.”
In Canada, Steelworker members have led the way in taking on the forces of globalisation. Through the Steelworkers Humanity Fund, a non-governmental organisation created by the union in the 1980s for international relief, development and solidarity, an “Inquiry into Corporate Behaviour in the Americas” was held last April in Quebec City. The Inquiry brought together workers from the North and the South — workers who share a common employer, but whose conditions of work range from decent to indecent. “Labour Day,” says Gerard, “offers a moment to reflect on how the lives of workers are being influenced all over the globe. Protecting our way of life is not about keeping opportunities away from workers in the South. It’s about taking a position against free trade deals that effectively deny labour and environmental rights. Raising standards. Saving jobs. Making corporations accountable for their global behaviour. Ensuring that governments respond to the needs of their citizens over the ‘wants’ of the corporations.”
Source: USWA

North America’s Labour Day, which falls on the first Monday of September, was first celebrated on September 5, 1882.

BRAZIL: Approximately 130,000 Brazilian autoworkers in the state of São Paulo began their campaign on August 30 for a wage hike of a minimum 7 per cent in September.
Workers at Ford, Toyota, DaimlerChrysler, Scania, Volkswagen, as well as auto parts plants are expected to down their tools in short temporary strike actions as a warning before wage negotiations get underway.
The 7 per cent demand is consistent with the rate of inflation over the last 12 months, however workers will go after a real pay increase as well.
Last year, autoworkers won a 10 per cent hike in pay, which was the first time in six years that their increase exceeded the rate of inflation.

MEXICO: Almost 97 per cent of the 12,500 striking workers at Volkswagen Mexico have voted against the carmaker’s latest offer of an 8.5 per cent pay increase plus improved benefits. Thus the strike at VW’s plant in the central Mexican city of Puebla, which is in its 13th day, will continue.
The general secretary of the Volkswagen trade union, José Luis Rodriguez Salazar, says that “we would really have to receive a more serious, feasible offer to take it back to a union assembly.”
The union’s latest demands stand at a 16 per cent wage increase, and the union says its members should get a big rise in pay because productivity at the Puebla plant keeps going up and Mexican workers at other international auto companies have won wage increases of between 10 per cent and 16 per cent this year.

SOUTH AFRICA: In a letter to the IMF and some of its affiliates, the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (Numsa) has expressed its sincere thanks for the solidarity support it received during the three-week strike in the auto industry.
“The employers learned that they have to reckon with workers who are organised at international level,” says Numsa. “We salute the trade union members and works council leadership of DaimlerChrysler’s plants in Germany and Brazil who took a stand against the intimidating threats of DaimlerChrysler to transfer production to other plants. We were encouraged by their message that they would resist any eventual transfer of production.”
However, some employers are resisting the settlement. “Toyota workers who went back on Monday, August 27, 2001, have resumed the strike today, August 29, 2001, when Toyota informed them that they will not grant them the 9 per cent.”
Numsa expects other plants to resume the strike if they are not satisfied with the progress of the negotiations.

AUSTRALIA: The Australian Manufacturing Workers’ Union (AMWU) reports that workers at Maintrain have won a victory that is a “landmark win for all Australian workers.”
The struggle at Maintrain was about the right of all workers to have security over their own accruing entitlements rather than they be used as an interest-free loan by the boss to prop up his business cash flow.
The resolution of the Maintrain dispute established a Bank Guarantee, underpinned by a contract with the State Rail Authority. This guarantee secures past and future accruing entitlements, together with the establishment of a Trust Fund with employees being the beneficiaries for the placement of future long service leave accruals.
Click on the associated links for the background of the dispute and for details of the settlement.

GERMANY: In a statement issued yesterday, August 28, 2001, the president of IG Metall, Klaus Zwickel, declared that the agreement reached in negotiations between the German metalworkers’ union and Volkswagen during the night of August 27-28 “is a success for the union”.
IG Metall’s demands to adjust the original project of VW – called “5,000 times 5,000” (see website news item of August 2, 2001) – to the existing standards of the 35-hour week and wages in the regional agreement have been met. At the same time, the new agreement contains new elements for collective bargaining and qualification in the organisation of work.
VW’s new mini-van model, to be built in its giant assembly plant in Wolfsburg, Germany, where the company is based, is “an important signal for the creation of jobs,” said Zwickel, “and for the competitiveness of Germany as a production site, contrary to all legends about the supposed ‘unattractive’ wages and working conditions in Germany.”
The negotiations between IG Metall and VW management, which broke down in June over union objections to the company’s proposed terms, had resumed on August 27.

SOUTH AFRICA: The auto strike organised by the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa, which began on August 6 and saw virtually all production halted for three weeks at BMW, Nissan, Toyota, Delta/General Motors, Ford and DaimlerChrysler (Volkswagen was able to continue production), was suspended “until further notice” on August 26.
Workers agreed to return to their jobs after accepting a wage hike of 9 per cent negotiated between the union and the Automobile Manufacturing Employers Organisation. The pay increase will be backdated to July 1, 2001, with a guaranteed improvement factor of 1 per cent above the inflation rate in years two and three of the agreement, which has not yet been signed as several issues are still being negotiated before a national arbitration panel.
The union commended its members for their unity and strength throughout the dispute, despite continued threats from the employers that they were losing millions of rand in wages and might shift production to other parts of the world.
The strike drew key solidarity support from the international trade union movement. German DaimlerChrysler workers and their General Works Council had declared they would refuse a transfer of production to Germany or any overtime to compensate for production losses due to the strike, as did the Brazilian workers and their Works Council at the Sao Bernardo DaimlerChrysler plant.