Severe union busting in Georgia

Over last few weeks in February, RMG, producing more than 10 per cent of Georgia’s total exports, harshly forced some 1,000 members of TUMMCIWG to terminate their union membership as a result of an increased coercion and persecution.

The union busting began immediately after TUMMCIWG reminded the management to fulfill its obligations under the collective bargaining agreement signed on 23 March 2014 after a 40-day strike.

As soon as mining operations were resumed in December 2014, following the approval of the mining operations by the Ministry of Culture and Monument Protection and the National Agency of Cultural Heritage Protection, management started a full-fledged union busting campaign against union members at RMG Gold and RMG Copper. The site is reported to be one of the oldest in the world, dating back to almost 5000 years ago.

Employer's representatives forced employees to sign pre-printed union resignation letters. These acts of applied pressure are in violation of both national and international laws on human and trade union rights.

Tamazi Dolaberidze, TUMMCIWG’s President, denounced the company in phone calls to several high-ranking company officials and warned them about criminal responsibility under the Georgian Criminal law. However the pressure still continues.

Several truck drivers who had refused to sign the resignation letters at the beginning, have been forced to do so, as management stopped transportation of the ore by leaving workers without work and pay during the forced idle time.

IndustriALL General Secretary Jyrki Raina wrote to the management of RMG urging to stop violations of law and to prevent further union busting. IndustriALL also demanded RMG to fulfill its obligations according to the agreement signed in March 2014.

ThyssenKrupp imposes cuts at the expense of the weak at AST Terni

“Industrial workers cannot be used as release valves to reduce the tensions resulted from ThyssenKrupp policy at steel plant in Terni of Ast after the agreement on 3 December”, reads the joint union statement of CGIL, CISL and UIL in Terni Umbria.

The agreement was signed after a 40-day long strike in the beginning of December, between unions, employers and different governmental institutions. It guarantees sub-contractual workers their outplacement and training, but according to the union so far this remains only on paper.

The unions believe that the multinational company is bringing to the extreme its strategy to maintain costs at the expense of subcontractors. Out of fear to lose important contracts, they accept the new conditions and shift all charges on the workers. The consequences are already visible; decreased wages, deteriorated rights, as well as modifications in the contracts of sub-contract workers resulting in job losses.

In response to the situation Cgil, Cisl and Uil declared their readiness to start a labour dispute at the ThyssenKrupp steel plant in Terni.

Around 1,500 workers could be affected by the dispute. The unions say that at least one hundred jobs losses are confirmed and believe that number will increase if the company does not review its policy.

The union is seeking a meeting with the leadership of the company and prepares for mobilizations in case workers’ demands are not heard.

Jóvenes y gremios se manifiestan contra ley que reduce salarios

La Confederación General de Trabajadores del Perú (CGTP) convocó a los jóvenes y a los trabajadores a salir a la calle y dirigirse a la Confederación Nacional de Instituciones Empresariales Privadas (Confiep) para expresar su rechazo a la ley Nº 4008, porque promueve la reducción de los beneficios laborales y permite los ceses colectivos.

Además la movilización se realizó en apoyo a la derogatoria del Decreto Supremo Nº 013-2014 ya que facilita los despidos masivos. Los manifestantes se trasladaron desde el Centro de Lima a la sede de Confiep. El encuentro duró cuatro horas y no hubo incidentes de violencia

Según Almed Albùjar, dirigente de la Federación Nacional de Trabajadores Textiles del Perú (FNTTP), ambas normas violan el derecho de los trabajadores. El decreto por ejemplo establece que si la empresa tiene pérdidas en tres semestres consecutivos, puede cesar al 10% de su planilla.

Nuevo ministro de trabajo y su responsablidad con la sociedad peruana

El 17 de febrero, el presidente de la República Ollanta Humala, encabezó la ceremonia de juramentación de los nuevos ministros de Estado. Allí nombro a Daniel Maurate, como Ministro de Trabajo, quien solía ocupar el cargo de ex viceministro de Promoción del Empleo.

Según la dirigente de la CGTP Carmela Sifuentes, Maurarte tiene la responsabilidad de concretar y continuar lo dialogado con el anterior ministro, Fredy Otárola. A su vez debe atender las exigencias de la juventud y la sociedad peruana, como por ejemplo el aumento de la Remuneración Mínima Vital, ya que el incremento del costo de vida disminuye la capacidad adquisitiva de los salarios.

Por su parte Daniel Maurate anunció nuevas reuniones con gremios laborales y empresariales para los próximos días, como la CTP (Central de Trabajadores del Perú) y la CUT (Central Unitaria de Trabajadores), al igual que con los jóvenes que encabezaron las movilizaciones contra la ley laboral juvenil. Su intención es  escucharlos para llegar a consensos, empezando por cuál debe ser la agenda prioritaria.

El proyecto de ley nº 4008 se encuentra actualmente en el Congreso de la República. Según Maurate el Congreso todavía no debería aprobar ese proyecto de ley hasta que no se consiga evaluarlo y consensuarlo, luego de escuchar la voz de los sindicatos.

La Oficina de IndustriAll Global Union en América Latina y el Caribe respalda y apoya la manifestación de la FNTTP que busca tutelar los derechos y los logros sindicales de los trabajadores y jóvenes.

NUM marches against Glencore

"We are being severely provoked and undermined by Glencore’s behaviour in South Africa," says NUM National Education Secretary Ecliff Tantsi.

“Glencore claims to respect human rights, community culture, collective bargaining and the right of employees to freely choose their union, but its practice is far from its rhetoric.” 

On 21 February, 2,000 NUM members at the Optimum colliery in the Mpumalanga Province organized a peaceful march to manifest their frustration and anger at Glencore’s CEO, EXCO and Board of Directors in South Africa and abroad.

The NUM has noted with grave concern Glencore’s tendency to buy companies with the aim of closing them and keeping the mining license. 

"Glencore is maximizing profit using vulnerable contractor’s employees. This behaviour is in direct contradiction to the company’s commitment in October 2012; when the merger was approved they promised there would be no retrenchments of any of the 100 lower level employees," says Tantsi.

A new amendment bill in employment equity clearly stipulates that employees should be paid equal salary for the same job. According to the NUM, closing the Optimum Colliery is clear move by Glencore to avoid this bill.

Tantsi says:

"Glencore is not willing to be subjected to the rule of law in our country."

The NUM has given Glencore seven days to respond to its demands:

Glen Mpufane IndustriALL Director of Mining says that global solidarity is key to showing Glencore how to treat its workers:

Glencore is behaving true to its status as a commodity trader rather than a mining company. They are not in mining for the long haul, but for the short term and that short term is profit. Glencore’s experiment in South Africa must be rejected, as must its experiment at Sherwin Alimuna.

USA: Workers fight back against giant oil companies

US oil industry collective bargaining agreements expired starting 31 January. Since the industry has refused to offer a reasonable proposal, workers are now on strike at 15 facilities across the USA. The strike includes 7,000 workers at 12 refineries, representing about 1/5 of the total oil refining capacity in the whole country.

Health and safety issues are key to this dispute. In 1973, a predecessor of the USW won a hard-fought nation-wide strike against Shell Oil for improvements in health and safety. However, in the decades since then, those gains have been eroded by staff reductions, contracting out, and cost cutting.

Corners are cut on maintenance, equipment is purchased on “low bid”, and more and more skilled refining jobs are contracted out to lower-paid and more easily intimidated, usually non-union, temporary workers. This has left US facilities with less than a skeleton staff of professionals – in many cases, there are not enough staff on the site to deal safely with normal operations, let alone an unplanned emergency. Short staffing leads to inhuman shift schedules and chronic stress and fatigue.

The oil industry is one of the richest industries on the planet. Yet it consistently displays contempt for the health and safety of the people who earn their profits for them and those living in nearby communities.

IndustriALL's 50 million affiliated workers worldwide fully support the United Steelworkers in their struggle against a rich and dangerous industry, and major oil industry unions are taking solidarity actions.

IndustriALL Assistant General Secretary Kemal Özkan says:

We will continue to support our brothers and sisters in the US oil sector and will do everything in our power to help them reach victory.

IG Metall secures 3.4 per cent industry pay rise

The agreement was reached in the early hours of 24 February between IndustriALL Global Union affiliate, IG Metall, and employers’ groups.

The deal, which affects 800,000 metal and electronics workers in the key German industrial region of Baden-Württemberg, will provide the basis for bargaining agreements in other regions across the country covering a total 3.7 million workers.

The pay rise is due to take effect in April and marks an important victory for the union:

“With this result we are bringing stability to the German economy,” said IG Metall’s president Detlef Wetzel.

More than 850,000 IG Metall workers from all over the country staged warning strikes from the end of January as union leaders and employers’ groups battled over pay and benefits for the next 12 months.

Workers will also be paid a one-off payment of 150 Euros to cover January to March following the end of the previous collective agreement.

Further gains were made in relation to early retirement, in particular for lower paid workers. In the future, employers will pay 90 per cent of salaries while workers work through a period of early retirement, which will then be continued once they have stopped work and up until their official retirement age. It means that early retirement will be more affordable for lower income employees, particularly on assembly lines and in general production.

In addition, money not used by companies in funding early retirement (which must be accessible to a minimum of 4 per cent of the workforce), must now be used to pay for staff training schemes.

The IG Metall president marked the progress as “the first important step” in establishing a model for workers’ rights for career development.

IndustriALL’s assistant general secretary Kemal Özkan said:

“We congratulate IG Metall on this considerable achievement. IG Metall has once again shown its muscle and won a significant pay rise for workers in the metal and electronics sector. The massive support from close to a million workers in a series of warning strikes is a tribute to the power of worker solidarity.”

Rio Tinto seeks conflict with unions at global meeting

The meeting was held at Rio Tinto’s office in Zurich on 6 February. It was jointly agreed to by a Rio Tinto Executive Committee member and IndustriALL Global Union, with the backing of a global network of unions at Rio Tinto. The company had agreed in advance to a fixed agenda for the meeting.

“Rio Tinto behaved arrogantly from the start of the meeting, issuing ultimatums, threatening legal action and talking over us. I’ve rarely seen that sort of behavior by management since the apartheid era ended,” stated National Union of Mineworkers South Africa General Secretary and IndustriALL Vice President Frans Baleni.

“I made the trip from Australia to Switzerland in the hopes of making progress on problems that Rio Tinto’s Australian management has refused to address. These include extensive bullying and alleged sexual harassment at the company’s Hunter Valley Coal operations,” said CFMEU Mining & Energy General Secretary and IndustriALL Mining Chair Andrew Vickers.

“Instead, Rio Tinto said they were only willing to talk if we accepted their ultimatum to end our campaign. The company publicly claims they are willing to work with key stakeholders like unions, but the message they sent to us was ‘my way or the highway’.”

“Rio Tinto’s behavior in Labrador, Canada is bad for business and bad for workers. There are 2,300 outstanding grievances that are demoralizing the workforce, and local management refuses to work with the union to address them,” said USW staff representative Euclid Hache.

“We hoped that Rio Tinto’s corporate management would work with us to find a path toward less conflictual labor relations in Labrador. Instead they rejected dialog and escalated the conflict.”

“Unfortunately I was not surprised,” said Rio Tinto European Works Council Secretary Véronique Roche. “Rio Tinto routinely fails to dialogue with or respect their European employees and unions.”

“IndustriALL has over the last year run a campaign to expose the huge gap between Rio Tinto’s sustainability claims and its actual practices. Our aim – as we have made clear over the course of the campaign – is to convince Rio Tinto to live up to its own claims. That would make Rio Tinto a better, more successful company and be good for all the company’s stakeholders,” said IndustriALL Assistant General Secretary Kemal Özkan.

Unfortunately the campaign has not yet achieved its aim, as Rio Tinto corporate management demonstrated by refusing to continue dialog with us. So we will redouble our efforts. 

Benetton agrees to pay Rana Plaza compensation

IndustriALL General Secretary Jyrki Raina said:

"We are pleased that at long last Benetton has promised to pay into the Rana Plaza Trust Fund. Now, it’s time for Benetton to show us the colour of their money. 

“We call on Benetton to do what’s morally right and compensate with compassion. We expect to see a significant contribution to the Rana Plaza Trust Fund by Benetton in keeping with a major brand that sourced from Rana Plaza and has a considerable investment in Bangladesh."

UNI Global Union General Secretary Philip Jennings said:

“We understand that Benetton promises to step up and take their share of the responsibility for the victims of the Rana Plaza tragedy.

“For a company with a profit of more than US200 million dollars and turnover of US1.6 billion dollars, we expect Benetton to show their most generous colours. UNI and IndustriALL are ready to talk to ensure fair compensation.”

Although IndustriALL and UNI are welcoming the move with caution, they highlighted some outstanding issues that urgently need to be resolved with regards to Benetton’s payment.

·         Almost two years since the Rana Plaza tragedy, the global unions questioned Benetton’s decision to delay its payment further and to confirm the amount it intends to pay. The unions call on Benetton to clarify these points well ahead of the second anniversary of the disaster on April 24th 2015.

·         The process on who will decide the amount that Benetton will pay remains unclear. Benetton says an “independent, globally recognised third party” will advise the company but refuses to reveal its identity.

The two global unions also urged caution regarding Benetton keeping its promises of payment and pointed out that Benetton was initially involved in the U.N.-backed Rana Plaza compensation arrangements from the beginning but pulled out before the trust fund was set up.

Right to strike hits home in Mexico

The government is fond of claiming that Mexico is a country of ‘zero strikes’. In reality, though, this is not the result of meaningful social dialogue. Instead, it is confirmation of the fact that the right to strike does not exist in a void, but is a consequence of the right to freedom of association – a right which in practice does not exist in Mexico.

To mark the day of action, the plenary of the Unión Nacional de Trabajadores (UNT), in a session attended by some 500 participants, heard a message from IndustriALL Global Union and committed to join with other democratic organizations in defence of the right to strike.

The Sindicato Mexicano de Electricistas (SME) also invited IndustriALL regional officer Laura Carter to address over 800 members in an event to mark the day of action. And independent unions who were gathered in a coordination meeting supported calls for the government to defend the protection of the right to strike at the ILO.

Since the adoption of the Labour Law Reform in 2012, attacks on labour rights have increased. Independent unions and their democratically-elected leaders are routinely denied legal recognition while yellow unions and their corrupt ‘protection contracts’ are foisted on workers. Strikes, if they do occur, are frequently ruled illegal. The most recent example of the erosion of labour rights is the attempt to push through a constitutional reform that would deny the collective rights of thousands of workers employed in decentralized state bodies (namely, the reform of article 123 b).

The independent unions could also be impacted in the event the upcoming review of the application of the International Labour Organization’s (ILO) Convention 87 and the follow-up to IndustriALL’s complaint to the ILO’s Committee on Freedom of Association are pushed on the back burner as the result of the disruption to the work of the ILO supervisory bodies caused by the Employers’ Group.

As a participant in the upcoming tripartite meeting on the right to strike and as a member of the ILO’s Governing Body, the government of Mexico will have a voice in the decision on whether to refer the matter to the International Court of Justice for a definitive interpretation, which is the position supported by the international labour movement.

IBM workers’ unions call for halt to job cuts

In a move that has angered IBM employees around the world, just as they are threatened with massive job losses, senior executives at IBM have been awarded multi-million dollar bonuses despite overseeing 11 consecutive quarters of poor financial performance.

Kan Matsuzaki, Director of ICT, Electrical and Electronics at IndustriALL Global Union, said:

IBM workers worldwide want to see IBM succeed but IBM executives need to realise that employees are assets to business success and not liabilities. It is essential for IBM to urgently engage in open and constructive dialogue with the trade unions who represent IBM workers to explain what is happening and why. Stonewalling its workforce is not an answer.

Alan Tate, Head of Information, Communication and Telecoms in Switzerland-based UNI Global Union which represents 3 million workers in ICT industries, said: “IBM workers around the globe are learning through the media to brace themselves for job. This uncertainty is creating high levels of anxiety among our members and it is damaging the reputation of IBM as an employer.

“Reports have been coming in from the USA, Canada and elsewhere that IBM workers are being given termination of contract notices. Other reports show that IBM workers’ work evaluations (‘PBC’) are being artificially lowered in order to justify increased job cuts. Meanwhile, company insiders are reporting that jobs are being terminated in order to move work out to countries where labour costs and social protections are considerably weaker.”

According to the USA-based Alliance@IBM Communication Workers of America (CWA) Local 1701 the threat of job cuts in the US and Canada may total in excess of 5,000 workers.

Members of IBM Global Union Alliance for workers at IBM have called on the company to halt its plans for job cuts and have made it clear that it makes no business sense to fire the very employees who are trying to fix the company’s woes through their unprecedented commitment to productivity and innovation.

The Alliance has also called on the company to sign up to an agreement with employees and their trade union representatives to demonstrate how much it values their contribution to the company as a means to improving morale. The IBM Global Union Alliance’s key demands are: