COLOMBIA. On March 29 in Boyacá, IMF affiliates UTRAMMICOL and FETRAMECOL, and unions affiliated to the ICEM unanimously decided to create a single National Manufacturing Industry Union in Colombia.

The national workshop, one of the Regional Seminars of the Tenth Round of the Trade Union Strengthening Project, was attended by members of the National Unity Council and the project’s Regional and Study Circle Coordinators, and agreed to build IndustriALL in Colombia.

The workshop debate on IndustriALL’s action programme, which prioritises the formation of national sector unions that are strong and capable enough to negotiate national collective sector and company level agreements, led union leaders to agree to form a single National Manufacturing Industry Union in Columbia.

The process will be led by the National Unity Council, composed of twelve members, including two representatives from each of the three national organisations (UTRAMMICOL, FETRAMECOL and the ICEM Union Council) plus one representative from each of the six main unions of these three organisations. Nohora  Stella Tovar will act as coordinator.

The three national organisations signed an agreement last year, agreeing to work towards unity and this has now crystallised in the form of the national manufacturing industry union.

Union leaders, led by Mauricio Castro of SINTRAMETAL/ UTRAMMICOL and Héctor Parra, President of FETRAMECOL, will present a draft political programme, structure and statutes of the new national union within 50 days.

This proposal will be circulated for debate among members and leaders of all the industrial unions concerned and will also be discussed and evaluated in the regional seminars scheduled to take place in June for the more than 75 leaders who have participated in the IMF’s Trade Union Strengthening Project and now IndustriALL.

The National Unity Council also defined a timetable for debates to develop ideas, legal solutions and proposals for dealing with issues such as property, collective agreements, membership and trade union forums. This will facilitate the work of turning the current company level unions, national unions and the two federations into a single national union. In June, after internal debates within the three organisations, they will agree a short and medium term timetable to implement this decision and political option.

The IMF believes this is a very important step and congratulates our colleagues for reaching this important decision, which is so favourable for the development of trade unionism in Colombia.

RUSSIA: Benteler workers in Kaluga, Russia, won the strike over recognition of their union. On April 2 at 8AM the administration of the plant issued an official statement accepting negotiations with the Interregional Trade Union of Autoworkers (ITUA).

During the strike the administration was using university students, several Volkswagen workers, office staff and construction workers as strikebreakers. The assembly line at Benteler didn’t stop, however, striking workers blocked the entries to the plant and stopped the lorries with Benteler components from going to Volkswagen, disrupting supplies, and also preventing strikebreakers from entering the plant. There are also reports that the car parts made by scabs are defective. The strike certainly affected VW performance.

The police completely left the plant on March 30; security guards didn’t interfere with the strike.

The ITUA is affiliated nationally to the union center Confederation of Labour of Russia (KTR). On March 31 KTR president Boris Kravchenko came to Kaluga. There was a meeting between Kravchenko, Dmitry Kozhnev (ITUA coordinator in Kaluga), Alexei Nastin (president of the union local at Benteler) and the governor of Kaluga region Anatoly Artamonov, members of the regional government, Benteler director Hubert Koopmann and HR director Elena Sirotkina.

The result of the meeting was the following: Koopmann and Sirotkina promised to issue an official statement recognizing the ITUA as social partner and accepting negotiations with it on Monday, April 2 at 8AM. Striking workers left the plant.

The administration fulfilled its promise, and on April 2 at 8AM the statement was announced. Collective bargaining with the ITUA will begin on Wednesday, April 4.

“The strike at Bentler is a huge success for the workers’ movement in Kaluga. The results will have a great impact on all the autoworkers in the region,”‘ said Olga Masson, editor of the ITUA newspaper Autoworker.

GENEVA:  Famous jeans brands including H&M, Levi’s, Lee, Diesel and Zara sourcing denim from Bangladesh came under fire with the release of new research revealing Bangladeshi garment workers continue to be exposed to deadly risks while producing faded jeans for European consumers. The report “Deadly Denim”, issued by the Clean Clothes Campaign in Geneva on March 23, found that large Bangladeshi factories exporting jeans overseas continue to use sandblasting.

Sandblasting is a technique applied to jeans fabric in order to make it look “worn-out”. Based on discovered risks of fatal lung diseases including silicosis for sandblasting workers, European countries prohibited these manufacturing processes many years ago. Reluctant to lose their profits, European companies have continued sourcing sandblasted jeans from non-regulated regions, particularly in Turkey, Syria, Bangladesh, Mexico, India and Indonesia, later moving to Southeast Asia and North Africa.

The International, Textile, Garment & Leather Workers’ Federation (ITGLWF) and the European federation have been campaigning against the use of sandblasting all over the world for many years. Thanks to this work the Turkish Ministry of Labour decided to ban the sandblasting in 2009.

Later, in 2010, ITGLWF celebrated another success when Levi Strauss & Co. and Hennes & Mauritz AB (H&M) became the first to implement a global ban on sandblasting in their supply chains. In so doing, these companies went beyond the ban adopted by Turkey and extended the ban to all operations globally.

Since then, many brands have declared that they no longer use sandblasting to fade their products, however, as the Deadly Denim report shows, often factories revert to the technique of manual or mechanical sand blasting in order to meet the design requirements and deadlines without informing their customers. The worn-out look can be achieved through the use of special heavy industrial equipment, but it requires additional investment and most companies prefer to use “cheap” workers’ lives instead.

In 2011, the ITGLWF worked with a number of brands to develop a Call to Action, which calls on brands to adequate steps to ban the process of sandblasting throughout their supply chains and to work with their suppliers to transition to safe alternative methods. So far a dozen brands have sigend on to the ban and efforts are underway to encourage others to join.

Clean Clothes Campaign is an alliance of organisations in 15 European countries including trade unions and non-governmental organizations, supporting the empowerment of workers in the global garment and sportswear industries.

CANADA: More than 8,000 people marched through the streets in Alma, Quebec on March 31 on behalf of locked-out workers belonging to Local 9490 of the United Steelworkers (USW). Some 780 workers at an aluminium smelter of Rio Tinto’s Alcan subsidiary have been shut out of their livelihoods since the end of December, making the economic stranglehold on the community of 30,000 clear to all.

The lockout was brought about by Local 9490’s effort to stop erosion of permanent jobs that pay a living wage of CAD 34-an-hour against Alcan’s labour plan, which is aimed at replacing those jobs with outsourced work that pays half that amount.

Bus-loads of union militants from across Canada joined local supporters and 50 international guests representing Rio Tinto workers in Australia, France, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, South Africa, the UK and US.

Manfred Warda, General Secretary of the International Federation of Chemical, Energy, Mine and General Workers’ Unions (ICEM) pledged that global labour will mobilize Rio Tinto workers across the globe in this struggle. "If the ruthless social agenda of Rio Tinto cannot be defeated here in Quebec, there will be little hope that it can be stopped when others face company attacks," Warda said.

Jyrki Raina, General Secretary of the International Metalworkers’ Federation (IMF), said Rio Tinto must "show respect for current and future workers and stop callously cutting labour costs and decent jobs without regard for the local economy. In a company that made a huge profit in 2011 with public subsidies, there is absolutely no justification for replacing good permanent jobs with outsourcing".

Daniel Roy, the United Steelworkers Quebec director, reminded the audience that in addition to no-interest loans over 30 years and electricity at an extremely discounted rate, the company was now earning CAD 15 million a month by selling back surplus electricity to the publicly owned Hydro-Quebec company, according to a leaked secret agreement.

ICEM Vice President and USW Canadian National Director Ken Neumann had a message for the Conservative government: "Prime Minister Stephen Harper clearly fell short of his task by failing to impose conditions on the sale of Alcan to Rio Tinto in 2007 and to protect jobs. For someone who is so bent on involving himself in labour relations, why doesn’t he intervene with Rio Tinto to put an end to this abhorrent lockout?"

Ken Lewenza, President of Canadian Auto Workers’ Union (CAW) told the cheering crowd that CAW Local 2301 had passed a resolution on doubling union dues in order to provide CAD 68,000 a month of support to the workers in Alma.
The USW Local 9490 and Rio Tinto Alcan returned to talks in March that are likely to continue. However, ICEM and IMF promised to go ahead with a global fight against Rio Tinto’s anti-social agenda.

NEPAL: The flag of the new Global Union, IndustriALL will be put at the top of Mt. Everest by Dorje Khatri. "I will leave Kathmandu on April 3, in a bid to conquer Mt Everest once again," said Khatri. "I will scale the top of the world, from May 15 to May 25, 2012; through South Col bordering to China. I will be back by June 5 in Kathmandu."

In a brief ceremony organized at Kathmandu, GEFONT President Bishnu Rimal handed the IndustriALL flag to Dorje Khatri. Khatri is the central committee member of GEFONT which is an affiliate of the Union of Trekking Travels Rafting and Airline Workers Nepal (UNITRAV), this expedition to Mt Everest will be his eighth attempt. The flag was rolled up in order to keep it secret, as the logo of the new organization will only be launched at the founding Congress in Copenhagen this coming June.

Cde Khatri has successfully completed seven previous attempts. Last year he had hoisted the International Trade Union Confederation’s (ITUC’s) flag under GEFONT coordinated campaign "Save Climate, Save Himalayas".

GEFONT President Rimal expressed his best wishes on behalf of GEFONT NEC and the entire Nepali working class. Khatri will climb Everest with a team from the UK called UK Adventure Peak , the same group that accompanied him last year. He has successfully taken the flags of the International Metalworkers’ Federation, GEFONT and the Building and Wood Workers’ International (BWI) in past years.

CHINA/GLOBAL: After an investigation at Foxconn in Shenzhen and Chengdu, the Fair Labour Association (FLA) released its report on March 29, 2012, pointing out pressing labour issues at Foxconn. IMF Director for Electronics, Jenny Holdcroft commented on the release of the FLA report on BBC world news on Friday 30 March 2012.

"Meaningful long-term improvements will not be achieved until the workers themselves are able to negotiate a collective agreement that addresses all the rights violations," said Jenny, "auditing alone will never be enough. The FLA has so far audited three out of Foxconn’s thirteen factories in China and Apple has 156 supplier companies."

The FLA report pointed out several pressing issues at Foxconn, including working hours, health and safety, industrial relations, compensation and interns. Foxconn is notorious for its harsh management methods, which is one of the factors that triggered the suicides in 2010. Still the problem of hash management and work pressure has been tactfully absent in the report and the gross violation of forced internship was not addressed at all.

Identifying problems at Foxconn will never be enough, any hope that conditions for workers will improve rests not on the work of auditors, but on the ability of workers themselves to monitor whether their labour rights are being respected and to push for remedies when they are not.

The FLA audit report commits Apple and Foxconn to give all employees a copy of the collective agreement but this is not sufficient, workers must be able establish a schedule of negotiations with the employer, which will lead to a collective agreement that covers all aspects of work including wages and working hours, overtime, and health and safety.

SPAIN: 10.2 million workers gave their support to the national strike announced by Confederación Sindical de Comisiones Obreras, CC.OO and the Unión General de Trabajadores UGT. At least four million people participated in 111 rallies and demonstrations across the country. The mobilization was a joint union response to the labour reforms and dismantling of public sector proposed by the government of the Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy.

According to union reports the national strike was by no way an easy exercise with some employers exerting pressure, including threats and even blackmailing aimed to undermine and discredit the strike. This did not stop workers from different sectors and enterprises joining together and unanimously condemning the government’s labour reforms foreseeing further reductions of labour and social rights of Spanish workers.

The Spanish unions do have alternative proposals on how to increase economic activity and reduce unemployment in Spain and are going to present their proposals to the President, political party groups in Parliament, as well as employers’ associations. On this point, the unions are demanding the President of Parliament to accelerate the presentation of the Popular Legislative Initiative (Iniciativa Legislativa Popular) signed by over a million people and presented in June 2011 by CC.OO and UGT.

At the same time, CC.OO and UGT are going to present allegations against the proposed labour reform to the Defender of the People (Defensor del Pueblo) and file a formal complaint to the International Labour Organization (ILO) against the Spanish Government imposing labour reforms in violation of several ILO Conventions ratified by Spain.

RUSSIA: Benteler workers in Kaluga, Russia, organized by the IMF affiliate Interregional Trade Union of Autoworkers (ITUA), went on strike in the evening of March 29.

Benteler workers struck, as management had repeatedly refused to negotiate with the union.

On February 29 the ITUA union local offered company management to begin negotiations, however, the company refused. In early March the workers held a work-to-rule strike which prompted management to accept negotiations. Still, collective bargaining didn’t begin in March, and instead of engaging in good faith negotiations with the union, management has adopted anti-union policies. It refused to register any documents handed over by the representatives of the ITUA and prohibited activists from remaining on plant premises during nonworking hours.

On March 29 at 08:00 pm Benteler workers went on strike. Earlier that evening ITUA coordinator in Kaluga Dmitry Kozhnev took part in the meeting with company management, city authorities and the prosecutor’s office. Company management stated that it refused to negotiate with the ITUA alone, since it didn’t represent all workers. Kozhnev replied that the ITUA represents Benteler workers in full accordance with Russian law. The management promised to prepare an official note accepting negotiations, however, it never did.

There have been reports of company intimidation and harassment towards the workers, including information that security guards tried to seize Kozhnev and throw him out of the building, but were stopped by the workers. Workers have continued to overwhelmingly support the ITUA.

Upon announcement of the strike, workers were forced by security guards out of the shops, but they managed to stay in the cafeteria. The plant was surrounded by riot police and security forces from both Benteler and nearby Volkswagen plant. However, workers from VW, also organized by the ITUA, as well as social and union activists from Kaluga went to the factory gates to support striking workers.

Benteler supplies car parts to the Volkswagen plant. Since there is no stock of Benteler components at VW, there is a possibility that production at VW will completely stop. Benteler workers managed to stop the assembly line at their plant for half an hour, however, the management has used the administrative staff and security guards as strikebreakers.

To date, some 100 striking workers are still at the plant. Company management ordered to take all food and beverages out of the cafeteria, so the ITUA organized a solidarity fund for food and water for the striking workers. Plans for future stoppages are underway.

In a letter addressed to Benteler CEO Hubert Koopmann, the IMF called on an end to attacks against strikers and urged the company to enter into good faith negotiations immediately. 
The IMF will continue to watch the situation closely and report on the events in Kaluga, Russia.

KOSOVO: The International Metalworkers’ Federation (IMF) joined with European and global union partners in sending letters to the Serbian government demanding Mr. Hasan Abazi’s immediate release and for all charges to be dropped.

The IMF is currently uncertainty as to where exactly Mr. Hasan Abazi is being held (possibly at the police station in Vranje) and also as to the exact nature of the charges against him.

In the letters the union federations particularly insist that charges must be dropped if they relate to past regimes or activities under those regimes.

The letter to Serbian authorities from the IMF was sent in conjunction with global unions International Federation of Chemical, Energy, Mine and General Workers’ Unions (ICEM), and International Textile, Garment and Leather Workers Federation is a Global Union Federation (ITGLWF).

TURKEY: The International Metalworkers’ Federation (IMF) urges supporters to sign the International Labour Rights Forum (ILRF) petition and stand with Turkish workers fighting to organize at Trexta.

Trexta has made its workers’ lives a living hell by forcing employees to work 30 hours non-stop without notice, discriminating against women who don’t ask for permission to get pregnant, and threatening workers when they raise safety concerns. To date, Trexta has fired 32 employees for organizing a union at the Çerkezköy facility in Turkey.

Serap Yazgac, a young worker at Trexta, decided she needed a union after she was severely burned by an industrial iron at a Trexta facility in Turkey. The manufacturing iron fell on her hand and stuck for several minutes before someone pulled it from her burning skin. Help could have come sooner but management had removed an emergency button, claiming that workers would misuse it. The company then refused to pay for Serap’s emergency care.

When Serap returned to work she was determined to make sure this accident never happened again, but when she tried to join a union to improve safety at Trexta she was fired without any valid reason.

Apple claims it is investigating the situation but Serap and her coworkers haven’t heard from Apple. Apple must demand that Trexta immediately reinstate all unfairly fired workers and recognize the workers’ right to form a union.

From the exploitation of workers at Foxconn in China to that of the workers at Trexta in Turkey, Apple must get to the source of the labour rights issues within its supply chain.