Labor Solidarity

[michelle]

LABOUR:
Plight of Workers in Palestinian Territories Has "Worsened Dramatically"
Gustavo Capdevila

GENEVA, May 28 (IPS) - Workers in the Palestinian territories occupied by Israel have suffered another year of drastic decline in living standards and rising poverty, unemployment, social disintegration and political chaos, the ILO said in a new report.

The proportion of households below the poverty line increased 26 percent between March 2006 and March 2007, according to the report released Monday, which is based on the findings of high-level missions sent by the ILO (International Labour Organisation) in April to Israel and the occupied Arab territories.

Per capita gross domestic product (GDP) dropped 40 percent in those areas between 1999 and 2006.

Seven out of 10 households, comprising around 2.4 million people, are living in poverty in the occupied territories, says the report, which will be studied at the May 30-Jun. 15 sessions of the International Labour Conference, held every year in Geneva.

Only one out of three people in the territories work, while "two out of three persons are without employment, either because they are unemployed or because they are outside the labour force," says the report. Around 206,000 people are unemployed, equivalent to 24 percent of the workforce.

ILO Director General Juan Somavía said the situation in the occupied territories is "desperate". The violence has not ceased, and continues to affect both Palestinian and Israeli civilians, although to differing degrees of intensity, he said.

Somavía said economic activity in the occupied areas has been dramatically reduced, which has driven up poverty and unemployment, while making employment more and more precarious and hard to find. At the same time, companies are finding it increasingly difficult to operate because of the rise in logistics costs, and paychecks have become irregular, he added.

The head of the ILO stressed three aspects: that travel permits and control posts govern daily life for people in the occupied territories; that the Palestinian Authority has had to deal with a sharp reduction in funds; and that infighting and clashes between political parties has further complicated the situation.

The 40-year Israeli occupation of the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and the Golan Heights is not the only cause of the current deterioration in the region, says the report, which also mentions a series of measures taken after the elections that led to the change of government in the Palestinian territories in March 2006.

The January 2006 elections were won by the Hamas Islamic Resistance Movement, which is more radical in its opposition to Israel and the western governments that support it. The more moderate Fatah party has had control of the Palestinian National Authority since 1994.

The Western financial embargo on the Hamas-led government put in place after the elections has had devastating effects on the Palestinian people and economy, says the ILO.

That was aggravated by Israel's suspension of tax transfers to the territories, which has caused an estimated average monthly loss in income of 60 million dollars.

Altogether, the sanctions have led to a 50 percent loss in revenues for the Palestinian Authority.

Another factor was the imposition of even stiffer restrictions on the movement of persons and goods, which have reduced to a minimum the functioning of the economy of the occupied territories.

Palestinian market access, both within and outside the territories, is strictly controlled by the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF).

Somavía said the immediate cause of the difficult social and economic situation is the system of closures and controls, including Israel's separation wall.

The barriers are causing economic and social insecurity for people in the territories, he said, noting that a situation of prosperity and safety on one side and of military occupation, poverty and insecurity on the other is highly dangerous for both sides and is unsustainable.

The ILO says the Palestinian Authority, international donors and Israel should support entrepreneurs and workers to help consolidate businesses, encourage new investment and diversify the economy.

"This could contribute to fostering security and moving closer to a long-term negotiated solution to the conflict," the report adds.

"Reducing and removing barriers to the mobility of persons and goods within the territories, between Gaza and the West Bank and with the outside world, while ensuring security in Israel, is foremost among the measures that could avert the mounting economic and social crisis in the occupied territories," it says.

The ILO warns that the social fabric in the occupied territories is under the strain of a persistent high level of employment, especially among the young, and unprecedented levels of poverty and violence, including the deterioration of the rule of law.

Almost half -- 46 percent -- of the 2.4 million people in the occupied Palestinian territories are under 14 years of age, and the birth rate is a high 2.8 percent a year. (END/2007)

Source: ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=37926

[michelle]

Iraq's Workers Strike to Keep Their Oil
By David Bacon
t r u t h o u t | Columnist

Saturday 09 June 2007

The Bush administration has no love for unions anywhere, but in Iraq it has a special reason for hating them. They are the main opposition to the occupation's economic agenda, and the biggest obstacle to that agenda's centerpiece - the privatization of Iraq's oil. At the same time, unions have become the only force in Iraq trying to maintain at least a survival living standard for the millions of Iraqis who still have to go to work every day, in the middle of the war.

This week, Iraqi anger over starvation incomes and oil ripoffs boiled over. On Monday, June 4, the biggest and strongest of the Iraqi unions, the Iraqi Federation of Oil Unions, launched a limited strike to underline its call for keeping oil in public hands, and to force the government to live up to its economic promises. Workers on the pipelines carrying oil from the rigs in the south to Baghdad's big refinery stopped work. It was a very limited job action, which still allowed the Iraqi economy to function.

Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki responded by calling out the army and surrounding the strikers at Sheiba, near Basra. Then he issued arrest warrants for the union's leaders. On Wednesday, June 6, the union postponed the strike until June 11. Labor unrest could not only resume at that point, but could easily escalate into shutdowns on the rigs themselves, or even the cutoff of oil exports. That would shut down the income stream that keeps the Maliki regime in power in Baghdad.

Some of the oil workers' demands reflect the desperate situation of workers under the occupation. They want their employer - the government's oil ministry - to pay for wage increases and promised vacations, and give permanent status to thousands of temporary employees. In a country where housing has been destroyed on a massive scale, and workers often live in dilapidated and primitive conditions, the union wants the government to turn over land for building homes. Every year, the oil institute has miraculously continued holding classes and training technicians, yet the ministry won't give work to graduates, despite the war-torn industry's desperate need for skilled labor. The union demands jobs and a future for these young people.

But one demand overshadows even these basic needs - renegotiation of the oil law that would turn the industry itself over to foreign corporations. And it is this demand that has brought out even the US fighter jets, which have circled and buzzed over the strikers' demonstrations. In Iraq, the hostile maneuvering of military aircraft is not an idle threat to the people below. This standoff reflects a long history of actions in Iraq, by both the Iraqi government and the US occupation administration, to suppress union activity.

Iraq has a long labor history. Union activists, banned and jailed under the British and its puppet monarchy, organized a labor movement that was the admiration of the Arab world when Iraq became independent after 1958. Saddam Hussein later drove its leaders underground, killing and jailing the ones he could catch.

When Saddam fell, Iraqi unionists came out of prison, up from underground and back from exile, determined to rebuild its labor movement. Miraculously, in the midst of war and bombings, they did. The oil workers union in the south is now one of the largest organizations in Iraq, with thousands of members on the rigs, pipelines and refineries. The electrical workers union is the first national labor organization headed by a woman, Hashmeya Muhsin Hussein.

Together with other unions in railroads, hotels, ports, schools and factories, they've gone on strike, held elections, won wage increases and made democracy a living reality. Yet the Bush administration, and the Baghdad government it controls, has outlawed collective bargaining, impounded union funds and turned its back (or worse) on a wave of assassinations of Iraqi union leaders.

President Bush says he wants democracy, yet he will not accept the one political demand that unites Iraqis above all others. They want the country's oil (and its electrical power stations, ports and other key facilities) to remain in public hands.

The fact that Iraqi unions are the strongest voice demanding this makes them anathema. Selling the oil off to large corporations is far more important to the Bush administration than a paper commitment to the democratic process.

Iraq's oil was nationalized in the 1960s, like that of every other country in the Middle East. The Iraqi oil union became, and still is, the industry's most zealous guardian.

Holding a no-bid, sweetheart contract with occupation authorities, Halliburton Corporation came into Iraq in the wake of the troops in 2003. The company tried to seize control of the wells and rigs, withholding reconstruction aid to force workers to submit. The oil union struck for three days that August, stopping exports and cutting off government revenue. Halliburton left.

The oil and port unions then forced foreign corporations to give up similar sweetheart agreements in Iraq's deepwater shipping facilities. Muhsin's electrical union is still battling to stop subcontracting in the power stations - a prelude to corporate control.

The occupation has always had an economic agenda. Occupation czar Paul Bremer published lists in Baghdad newspapers of the public enterprises he intended to auction off. Arab labor leader Hacene Djemam bitterly observed, "War makes privatization easy: first you destroy society; then you let the corporations rebuild it."[/b]

The Bush administration won't leave Iraq in part because that economic agenda is still insecure. Under Washington's guidance, the Iraqi government wrote a new oil law in secret. The Iraq study commission, headed by oilman James Baker, called it the key to ending the occupation.

That law is touted in the US press as ensuring an equitable division of oil wealth. Iraqi unions say it will ensure that foreign corporations control future exploration and development, in one of the world's largest reserves.

Hassan Juma'a Awad, president of the IFOU, wrote a letter to the US Congress on May 13. "Everyone knows the oil law doesn't serve the Iraqi people," he warned. The union was banned from the secret negotiations. According to Juma'a, the result "serves Bush, his supporters and foreign companies at the expense of the Iraqi people." The union has threatened to strike if the law is implemented.

Like all Iraqi unionists, Juma'a says the occupation should end without demanding Iraq's oil as a price. "The USA claimed that it came here as a liberator, not to control our resources," he reminded Congress. Congressional opponents of the war can only win Iraqis' respect if they disavow the oil law.

Whatever government holds power in Baghdad at the occupation's end will need control of the oil wealth to rebuild the devastated country. That gives Iraq's working people a big reason to fight to ensure that happens.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
David Bacon is a California photojournalist who documents labor, migration and globalization. His book Communities Without Borders was just published by Cornell University/ILR Press.

Source: www.truthout.org/docs_2006/060907A.shtml
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Also See:

US Labor Against the War at: www.uslaboragainstwar.org

Voices of Iraqi Workers
Solidarity Tour

June 4-29, 2007

Atlanta, Berkeley, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Milwaukee, New York City, Philadelphia, San Francisco, San Jose, Santa Cruz, Washington, DC


Co-sponsored by the American Friends Service Committee and United for Peace & Justice


People to People - Face to Face


Iraqi labor leaders tell it like it is
to the American people

[michelle]

Global Uniform Justice for all Workers vs Big Business

The two cases highlighted below are important to keep your eye on. The first lawsuit accuses Dole Fresh Fruit Co. and Standard Fruit Co., now a part of Dole, and Dow Chemicals of negligence and fraudulent concealment from Nicaraguan banana workers while using pesticides. The case is being heard in a Los Angeles courtroom. The second case, in federal court, involved an Alabama coal company who allegedly worked with paramilitaries in Colombia to kill union officials. Ruling on this case was in favor of the company. However, said Beth Stephens, a law professor at Rutgers University, Camden, N.J: "It is a big step to go from a human rights report that is convincing to facts that can be brought to the United States and put in front of a jury, but just because this case was not successful, it does not mean that other cases cannot make that step."

These cases are of the few in which an American company has been sued in the US for alleged damages occurring overseas. Typically, such lawsuits are referred back to their country of origin. The gap between the administration of justice in developing countries in comparison to the administration of justice in the US is huge. In the US, juries are known for awarding bigger judgments.

As I said, these cases are important because, in my opinion, if a ruling is brought against these American companies for their foreign workers, it could well start the beginning of the end of the united States military being used to pave the way for the multinational companies' exploitation of labor and natural resources abroad. Americans companies should afford all workers the same rights and protection as they do [or did!] in the united States and we US citizens should demand this of them. There's your job protection, folks....same pay and rights, worldwide....no out sourcing to lower paying countries....it's also the right thing to do.

If you want to know just how ruthless a company can be, refer to the previous page for a look at how Dole and other multinationals in Colombia routinely paid paramilitaries to act as union busters, killing labor leaders and making it the most dangerous in the world for organized labor officials:
SEE:
Re: Labor Solidarity
« Reply #14 on May 21, 2007, 8:50am »
Big banana firms paid off terrorists, Colombian ex-warlord tells inquiry

Workers of the World, Unite!
Michelle

Pesticide Trial Begins Against Dole, Dow
By T. Christian Miller
The Los Angeles Times
Friday 20 July 2007

The food company used a product by the chemical maker that made Nicaraguan workers sterile, lawyer says. The firms deny it.

Nearly three decades of legal struggle came to a head in a Los Angeles courtroom Thursday, as a trial began in a case pitting impoverished Latino field hands against two of America's largest corporations.

Dole Food Co. knowingly exposed Nicaraguan banana workers three decades ago to a pesticide made by Dow Chemical Co. that caused permanent sterility, an attorney for the men said in opening arguments in Los Angeles County Superior Court.

"The workers were not told that [the pesticide] may affect their fertility," Duane Miller, a Sacramento attorney, told jurors. "They weren't told until the '90s - and they weren't told by Dow or Dole."

Attorneys for Dow, which is based in Midland, Mich., and Dole, which is based in Westlake Village, argued that the companies used the chemical responsibly and that the workers had not been exposed to enough to cause harm.

"We're talking about no dangerous exposure to the plaintiffs," said Rick McKnight, the lead attorney for Dole. He waved a silver tablespoon in the air to represent the amount of the chemical applied per banana tree. The pesticide "certainly wasn't the cause of their sterility."

The case marks the first time that an American company has gone before a jury to face accusations that the pesticide, called DBCP, poisoned field hands in banana plantations in another country.

Since the 1980s, attorneys have filed civil lawsuits on behalf of more than 30,000 workers on plantations in Africa, Latin America and the Philippines.

Although some of those lawsuits have settled, none has been presented to jurors. Twelve workers have alleged sterilization in Thursday's case, though thousands of additional workers in Nicaragua are preparing to sue.

The case is also one of the few in which an American company has been sued in the U.S. for alleged damages occurring overseas. Typically, such lawsuits are referred back to their country of origin.

Coincidentally, one other case involving alleged damages committed abroad is now on trial. In that case, in federal court, an Alabama coal company is alleged to have worked with paramilitaries in Colombia to kill union officials. Company officials have denied the charge.

The cases have attracted the attention of legal scholars and plaintiff's attorneys, who have struggled to determine an equitable system of justice in a world where commerce is global, but courts are local.

"This is the tip of the iceberg," said Walter Lack, a Los Angeles attorney who represents another group of workers allegedly sterilized by the chemical. "This is the beginning."

The pesticide cases' serpentine history leads from a chemical vat in a dusty Central California town to the leafy jade green banana plantations along Nicaragua's western coast.

At every step, the case has been marked by intrigue. Attorneys have been accused of fraud, and Nicaraguan workers have held hunger strikes. In addition, top Dole officials have met with Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega to offer the possibility of jobs if the country made changes to its legal system that would make it more difficult to sue.

When introduced in the 1950s, DBCP, or dibromochloropropane, was considered a wonder chemical, able to destroy microscopic worms in the soil, which had wasted the crops of farmers for hundreds of years.

It soon grew to be one of the biggest sellers for Dow and Shell Oil Co., the two major producers of the chemical. An Occidental Petroleum Corp. subsidiary mixed DBCP with other ingredients at its factory in Lathrop, Calif.

Then in 1977, about three dozen workers at the plant were proven to be sterile in medical tests. Six sued, winning a $4.9-million judgment against Dow.

The attorney in that case was Miller. Returning to the same arguments 30 years later, he told jurors he would show that Dow and Dole knew the pesticide damaged lab animals' testes as far back as the 1950s yet continued selling and using the product at its overseas plantations.

In Nicaragua, he said, Dole sprayed the chemical through the air, exposing laborers who lived near and worked in the fields, and did not provide proper protective equipment.

Miller methodically placed copies of old internal memos onto an overhead projector to show that the companies were aware of the dangers. In one memo, a Dole official said it was "well-nigh impossible" to implement some safety measures at the plantations.

Miller declined to state how much money his clients were seeking in damages.

"My clients went into the fields in clothing that you might wear in the streets - jeans, a cotton shirt and ordinary shoes," Miller told the jury of seven men and five women.

Dow's lead attorney, Gus Filice, told the jurors that the company had diligently investigated the chemical's dangers and warned Dole about the precautions needed when using it.

He said tests taken by the company showed that the amount of DBCP in the air was far below the level that would cause damage.

"Dow Chemical Co. acted in a responsible manner at each and every step," said Filice, who is based in Oakland. "They acted precisely the way we would want a large chemical company to act."

The trial is expected to take two and a half months.

Source: www.truthout.org/issues_06/072007LA.shtml

More on the case above:

Latin American Banana Farmers Sue U.S. Companies Over Pesticides
By NOAKI SCHWARTZ
Business Week, July 11, 2007
Straight to the Source

The pesticide was designed to kill worms infesting the roots of banana trees on Latin American plantations.

But at least 5,000 agricultural workers from Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Honduras and Panama have filed five lawsuits in this country claiming they were left sterile after being exposed in the 1970s to the pesticide known as DBCP.

Jury selection for the first of the lawsuits is scheduled to begin Tuesday in Los Angeles County Superior Court.

"This is the first time any case for a banana worker has come before a U.S. court," said Duane Miller, one of the attorneys representing more than 30 Nicaraguan plaintiffs who worked on plantations from 1964 to 1990.

The cases raise the issue of whether multinational companies should be held accountable in the country where they are based or the countries where they employ workers, legal experts said.

A verdict in favor of the workers could open the door for others to file similar claims in the U.S., where juries are known for awarding bigger judgments.

"The administration of justice in developing countries in comparison to the administration of justice in the U.S. -- there's a big gap," said Alejandro Garro, a Columbia University law professor.

"The significance of it is we're talking about a global economy where big business does business all over the world and where we don't have a uniform type of justice," he said

The upcoming lawsuit was filed in 2004 and accuses Dole Fresh Fruit Co. and Standard Fruit Co., now a part of Dole, of negligence and fraudulent concealment while using the pesticide.

Dow Chemical Co. and Amvac Chemical Corp., manufacturers of the pesticide, "actively suppressed information about DBCP's reproductive toxicity," according to the lawsuit.

Attorney Erin Burke, who represents Westlake-based Dole, and Kelly Kozuma, a spokeswoman for Newport Beach-based Amvac, declined to comment.

Scot Wheeler, a spokesman for Midland, Mich.-based Dow, said in an e-mail that the lawsuits were without merit, and that "there are no generally accepted studies in the scientific community of which we are aware which establishes an effect on sterility in banana farm workers" exposed periodically to the chemical.

"Workers bringing these claims rotated jobs often or changed jobs altogether with enough frequency that long-term exposure would have been fairly unusual and it is not likely that there is any injury whatsoever related to DBCP," Wheeler wrote.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Web site says the chemical was used as a fumigant on more than 40 different crops in the U.S. until it was largely phased out by 1979.

Long-term exposure to the pesticide causes male reproductive problems, including decreased sperm count, according to the site, which lists DBCP as a "probable human carcinogen."

In April, all five lawsuits were placed under the jurisdiction of Superior Court Judge Victoria Chaney. The legal actions involve claims on behalf of workers from Nicaragua, Honduras, Panama, Guatemala and Costa Rica. Other growers and manufacturers are named as defendants.

straight to the source: BusinessWeek, Associated Press, Noaki Schwartz, 08 Jul 2007

Source:
alerts.organicconsumers.org/trk/click?ref=zqtbkk3um_1-c0x3180x3249492&
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Alabama Company Is Exonerated in Murders at Colombian Mine
By Kyle Whitmire
The New York Times
Friday 27 July 2007

Birmingham, Alabama - A federal jury found on Thursday that Drummond, an Alabama-based coal company, was not liable for the deaths of three union leaders at its mine near La Loma, Colombia, in 2001.

The case, which ended after a two-week trial in Federal District Court here, was the first of its kind to go to trial under the Alien Tort Statute, a 218-year-old law that labor unions and human rights advocates have recently used to sue American corporations over abuses in developing countries. However, the jury dismissed the plaintiffs' accusations that Drummond had aided in the murders of the union leaders.

"We said from the beginning that the allegations were not true, and we are gratified that a jury of 10 people could hear the evidence and agree," a Drummond lawyer, William Jeffress, said after the verdict.

Drummond, a subsidiary of the Drummond Company, began mining coal in Colombia in 1996. It now operates the world's largest open-pit coal mine there, where last year it extracted about 25 million tons of coal.

In March 2001, right-wing paramilitary troops pulled two union leaders - Victor Orcasita and Valmore Locarno - from a company bus that was taking them home from the mine. Gunmen killed Mr. Locarno by the roadside and Mr. Orcasita's body was found later with bullet wounds to the head and signs of torture. About six months later, Gustavo Soler, who had succeeded Mr. Locarno as president of the union, was found shot to death.

Lawyers from the United Steelworkers of America and the International Labor Rights Fund sued the company on behalf of the union leaders' families under the Alien Tort Statute. The suit contended that Drummond had taken sides in Colombia's 40-year civil war and that the company had given material assistance to the paramilitary groups in exchange for the murder of the union leaders.

At trial, however, the plaintiffs could not prove clear connections between the company and the paramilitary groups.

"It is a big step to go from a human rights report that is convincing to facts that can be brought to the United States and put in front of a jury," said Beth Stephens, a law professor at Rutgers University, Camden, N.J. "But just because this case was not successful, it does not mean that other cases cannot make that step."

In closing arguments, Mr. Jeffress acknowledged that the working conditions at the mine were initially primitive and that many of the union's grievances in 2001 were legitimate, but he insisted that Drummond and its executives were not murderers. Taking sides in the civil war would only have made the company a target in the conflict, he said.

Similar lawsuits are pending against several other American corporations, including Exxon Mobil, Occidental Petroleum and Chiquita Brands International, but according to Peter J. Spiro, a law professor at Temple University, this case differed because of Drummond's lower profile. The company did not have a household name to protect, unlike some others.

"A company like Drummond is in a better position to go to the mat on these kinds of claims because the hit outside the courtroom is going to be a manageable one," he said. "When you are looking at companies with brands that they have to protect, even if they win in the courtroom, they might lose at the cash register."

The Drummond victory is symbolic, but it will not likely deter similar lawsuits, Mr. Spiro said, because the jury verdict does not test the underlying legal theory of the Alien Tort Statute. Those issues of the law's application must be determined on the appellate level.

After the verdict, the plaintiff's lead lawyer, Terry Collingsworth, said that an appeal would be swift and that he doubted the verdict would hurt similar lawsuits elsewhere. "These facts are these facts," he said of the lawsuit. "But the law is still permitting these cases to go forward."

Source: www.truthout.org/issues_06/072707LA.shtml

[michelle]

Chiquita fined 25 million dollars for payment to paramilitaries Mon Sep 17, 12:57 PM ET

The following is a bitter sweet victory for the families of innocent Colombian workers and for those of us who look for justice in our world. Is a 25 million dollar fine to the company enough to stop this type of ruthlessness? Yes, under the law, persons and corporations are equivalent entities. But hey, there were company executives who approved these operations and their funding; shouldn't they be carted off to jail as the culprits?! Will 25 million dollars really hurt Chiquita and deter it from similar actions? I doubt it. Let us focus our thoughts on the civil lawsuit brought in by families of those killed by the paramilitaries and filed in a New Jersey district court so that true justice may be served.
The post before this one has information on cases held in united States' courts against U.S. multinational corporations' actions abroad and the importance of seeing more of this type of action ....Michelle


Chiquita fined 25 million dollars for payment to paramilitaries Mon Sep 17, 12:57 PM ET

WASHINGTON (AFP) - A US federal court Monday ordered the Chiquita banana company to pay 25 million dollars in fines for paying millions of dollars in protection money to Colombian paramilitary groups between 1997 and 2004. [For background see the previous page here. By the way, Chiquita has links to the Bush family....did you expect anything less? ]
Re: Labor Solidarity
« Reply #14 on May 21, 2007, 8:50am »
Big banana firms paid off terrorists, Colombian ex-warlord tells inquiry


Judge Royce Lamberth accepted an agreement between the company and the US government in March that spared company executives.

"I order that the corporation pays a fine of 25 millions dollars," he said.

Chiquita pleaded guilty to paying 1.7 million dollars to one of Colombia's most notorious paramilitary groups, the United Self-Defense Committees of Colombia, which the United States calls a terrorist group.

In accepting the fines, the prosecution agreed not to name or prosecute the executives involved in ordering the payments.

On Monday prosectors called the company's actions, which it has said were taken in the face of extortion, "morally repugnant." [Morally repugnant?! Yeah sure, that's telling those exceutives who approved the payments for killing innocent people. I'll bet they're really smarting from that admonishment! How about murderous criminals?!]

"Chiquita was funding the bullets which killed innocent Colombians," said prosector Jonathan Malis.

The company still faces a civil lawsuit brought in July by families of those killed by the paramilitaries.

That complaint, filed in New Jersey district court, accuses Chiquita Brands International of funding and arming known terrorist organizations in order to maintain control of Colombia's banana growing regions.

The suit seeks unspecified damages, but a class action lawsuit could result in damages being awarded to each victim of any paramilitary groups paid by Chiquita, potentially meaning tens of millions of dollars.

Source:
news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20070917/bs_afp/uscolombiaattacks_070917165703

[michelle]

TRADE: Only a Handful Are Lords of the Food Harvest
By Gustavo Capdevila

GENEVA, Sep 25 (IPS) - The food and beverage industry is experiencing a high degree of concentration, with 10 distributing companies controlling 24 percent of the world market, according to a report being studied this week by workers’, employers’ and government representatives gathered by the International Labour Organisation (ILO).

The same trend that is seen in sales is found in other stages of the industry, such as manufacture and transformation of food products, said the report’s author, Andrew Bibby, in his presentation of the ILO issues paper being discussed by the 70 participants at the Tripartite Meeting to Examine the Impact of Global Food Chains on Employment.

Bibby said that the strategy of diversification of food supply sources is no longer a novelty in the industry, and is closely linked to the globalisation of economic and trade relations.

What is new is the emergence of integrated world food chains, which employ 22 million people and are therefore a concern of the ILO’s.

At the top of the list of food and beverage companies is the Swiss company Nestlé, with 260,000 employees, followed by the Anglo-Dutch firm Unilever with 179,000 employees, and the United States’ PepsiCo with 157,000 workers, Sara Lee with 137,000, and Coca Cola with 132,300 employees.

Among corporations dedicated to retail sales, the final link in the chain, the U.S.-based Wal-Mart is in the lead with 1,800,000 employees, followed by French firm Carrefour with 440,500, the U.S. company Kroger with 290,000, Britain’s Tesco with 273,000 and the U.S.-based Albertsons with 234,000 workers.

This quasi-monopoly situation arises from the mergers and acquisitions of giant companies that have been accentuated in recent years.

The ILO report says that "although the largest companies are huge in terms of their turnover, the sheer size and diversity of the global food industry leaves plenty of room for further consolidation."

In 2006, Nestlé grossed 74.7 billion dollars, Unilever’s business was worth 49.6 billion, PepsiCo grossed 32.6 billion, Sara Lee 19.7 billion, and Coca Cola 41.8 billion dollars.

Wal-Mart’s sales in 2004 amounted to 29 billion dollars, while Carrefour sold goods for 99.1 billion dollars.

But these gross revenues pale in comparison with profit distribution. A producer of snow peas (mangetout) in Zimbabwe receives only 12 cents per dollar earned on the peas sold in supermarkets in industrialised countries. Similarly, a Kenyan producer of fresh vegetables is paid just 14 cents per dollar of produce sold.

A study of bananas exported from Ecuador to the United Kingdom found that plantation owners received 10 percent of the share of income from banana sales, while only 1.5 percent reached the plantation workers.

The processes described in the ILO issues paper, which are changing the nature of the global food industry, will also have an impact on industrial relations and social dialogue in the sector.

"There is potential for better industrial relations and higher levels of compliance with core labour standards from which both companies and workers would benefit -- particularly through greater involvement and participation of lead firms at all stages of the food supply chain," the paper says.

"The social partners in the food manufacturing industry have a record of successful collective bargaining in companies all over the world," the document says.

"To take just one example among many, Nestlé Asia-Pacific has signed collective agreements in several countries covering a wide range of issues including respect for trade union rights and protection against victimisation for union activities, equality of opportunities, and non-discrimination of grounds of age, sex, race or religion," it adds.

But workers’ spokesman Klaus Schroeter of Germany’s catering trade union claimed that the collective agreements mentioned in the ILO paper do not comply with national legislation in the countries concerned.

Schroeter said the report was unsatisfactory, and that it is not for the ILO to make statements in line with the views of the corporations, he said.

The trade unionist objected to the part of the issues paper that forecasts increasing demand for food products in Asia and Latin America, and said he concludes from the document that the trend is worrying analysts, who fear that a global increase in food consumption will result in scarcity on a worldwide scale.

He said he found it cynical that the ILO should express such a view when thousands of children are dying of hunger, and that the author of the report should have been aware of this. [but that would mean that the globalists and their corporate leaders actually care about world hunger...michelle]

In the three tripartite meetings he has attended, he has never seen such a bad ILO document, Schroeter asserted.

Statistics released in 2007 by the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) said that 854 million people, or 17 percent of the world population, suffer from hunger, and that their numbers are increasing. (END/2007)

Source:
www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=39403

[michelle]

The Sellout of Workers by Union Leadership

The following articles are concerned with the latest labor agreements negotiated between auto manufactures and their workers. The score is rat bastards 2, workers zero; union leaders, however have been gaining ground. You can apply this to nearly all union jobs and it's been progressing this way for many years. I saw it back in the 80s as a nonunion plant staffer who had strong sympathies to my guys and gals on the floor. I felt that the union in question was in the back pocket of management. Of course, I used to chide the younger union members for not going to their meetings 'cause the older retiring union members were selling out their own brothers and sisters in labor by voting for golden parachute retirement packages that would only be offered to them to get out early...the younger ones that followed...well the golden years would be a thing of the past for them, so I can't say that decreasing wages and benefits were totally crafted by management....So much for solidarity.

The first article shows that UAW workers, as a group, don't really understand what's going down. The second is a detailed piece on what labor is loosing and who's responsible for it. The third article is something I was gonna put up elsewhere but found an opening for it in Stephen Lendman's article.....Michelle

Protest Emerges as Some Workers Vote Against Chrysler Deal
By Micheline Maynard
The New York Times

Monday 22 October 2007

Detroit - The United Automobile Workers union has come face to face with a protest vote by its members at Chrysler over a tentative labor agreement at the automaker, dimming its chances of winning approval.

Workers at all four big assembly plants where voting has taken place have rejected the contract, including three over the weekend. However, the agreement has been approved at some smaller factories.

Voting will continue during the next few days, with crucial votes scheduled at major plants in Michigan and Illinois. The union has not said when ratification will be completed.

The no votes, at plants in St. Louis; Newark, Del.; and Detroit, among others, came amid fears by some workers that the contract did not give them as much protection as a similar one at General Motors, which won approval this month.

Those workers see the lack of job guarantees as violating the union's long-held principle of pattern bargaining, or winning the same terms at each Detroit auto company.

The latest plant to reject the contract was Chrysler's Jefferson North factory in Detroit, which makes the Jeep Grand Cherokee. Sixty percent of workers there voted against the contract on Sunday.

However, workers at a Chrysler parts plant in suburban Syracuse, N.Y., voted overwhelmingly in favor of the contract in their vote Sunday.

"They're not making any investments in future products, so I voted no," said Erik Williams, 36, a Jefferson North assembly line worker. Job protection is a critical point, since Chrysler is in the midst of a revamping effort that will eliminate 13,000 jobs in North America over the next few years, and because the company was sold in August to Cerberus Capital Management, a private equity firm.

The rejections are "a protest vote against Chrysler, because of the feeling that the pattern has been broken, and Chrysler should have given more guarantees," Gary Chaison, a professor of industrial relations at Clark University in Worcester, Mass., said Sunday.

He added, "It's a protest against the leadership of the UAW for agreeing to this. They want to send the leadership back to the table to get a better deal."

Before that happens, however, UAW leaders are lobbying workers in an effort to win approval for the tentative agreement, which was reached Oct. 10 after a six-hour strike.

Last week, the union's vice president at Chrysler, General Holiefield, spoke at meetings in Detroit and Delaware, while the union sent a letter to local leaders asking them to sign a memo endorsing the contract.

Even the union's president, Ron Gettelfinger, attended sessions at Local 7 in Detroit. Mr. Gettelfinger sat in the back of the room, however, and did not talk about the contract, participants said.

The UAW had no comment. Privately, union officials said such activity was not unusual when a contract's fate appears uncertain.

Still, Mr. Holiefield's involvement did not lead to victory at the Newark plant, which rejected the contract on Saturday. Chrysler plans to shut the plant under its reorganization program.

The Newark local's president, Richard E. McDonaugh Jr., said those who voted against the contract did not completely understand its details, a theme also raised by other union officials.

Mr. McDonaugh said he was "very, very fearful of what would happen if we go back into negotiations, what they could take away from us. I really feel this was the best deal they could get."

But that deal did not include the same promises of future work that were part of the GM contract, according to a summary distributed by the union.

One endangered plant is the St. Louis South factory in Fenton, Mo., which builds minivans. Future investments there depend on sales of Chrysler minivans, which are also built in Windsor, Ontario.

Workers at St. Louis South rejected the contract in results announced Saturday, joining their counterparts at the St. Louis North truck plant, who also voted no last week.

On Sunday, the parking lot at Chrysler's Jefferson North plant in Detroit became a site of debate. Workers huddled in small groups, trying to decide how to vote on the contract.

"There's been so much controversy, I'm just trying to talk to people," said Arthur Parker, 51, a forklift driver, who later said he had voted no.

Jeff Alberts, 48, of Toledo, Ohio, also said he had voted no. "We've got to start somewhere in this country," said Mr. Alberts, who works on the assembly line and has a two-hour daily commute. "The middle class is getting killed."

But James Tucker, 42, another assembly line worker, said he had voted for the contract.

"There's a lot of competition out there now," he said, referring to plants owned by foreign auto companies in the United States, "and if we go back to the table, we could end up with less than what we have now."

Nick Bunkley and Mary M. Chapman contributed reporting.

Source: www.truthout.org/issues_06/102207LA.shtml
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Monday, October 22, 2007
UAW Sellout at GM and Chrysler
- by Stephen Lendman

The September and October United Auto Workers (UAW) GM and Chrysler agreements are just the latest examples of union leadership surrender and betrayal. It's an ominous sign of labor's plight and clear indication of what's ahead - more for business, less for workers, and no relief in sight with union bosses out for themselves and more allied with business and imperial interests than their own rank and file.

American civilization and labor historian Paul Buhle sees organized labor today in a state of collapse, and labor author Robert Fitch says "American workers are like owners of a family car whose wheels fell off long ago. Each family member (must rely) on their own two feet; they scarcely remember what it was like being able to ride together." Who can dispute it with union membership down from its post-war 1950s high of 34.7% to the lowest private sector level in over 100 years at 7.4% today. In addition, inflation-adjusted wages are stagnant or falling, benefits are being slashed, and *Fitch says conditions in the garment and meatpacking industries are as bad today as the ones muckrakers like Upton Sinclair exposed a century ago in his book "The Jungle." [*here's the opening I refered to in my intro; see next article....M]

He blames it on union corruption at the top in different forms - leaders on the take, siding with business, getting big salaries and fancy perks and more concerned with their own welfare than the interests of their members. Nothing on the horizon points to change with corrupted UAW leaders Exhibit A.

Back in June, the UAW reached an agreement with Delphi Corporation that signaled what would follow with the auto companies. Following months of negotiating, it allowed the company to impose pay cuts up to 50%, lay off thousands, and slash health and retirement benefits. It was a win for company and a crushing defeat for Delphi workers.

Then in July, UAW and the United Steelworkers reached an agreement with auto supplier Dana Corporation that allows the unions to take over managing worker long-term disability and retiree healthcare coverage. The deal is projected to save Dana over $100 million a year, eliminate $30 - $40 billion in long-term company liabilities, and it gives UAW leadership another chance for what it wanted for years - a VEBA (voluntary employee beneficiary association) agreement putting the union in the healthcare business for the big profit potential it represents. More on that below.

In the past, VEBAs proved costly to UAW workers. The union set one up with Detroit Diesel in 1993 that cost company retirees dearly when funds in it ran out in 2004. It happened again to Caterpillar retirees in 2005 who'll see their out-of-pocket costs triple by 2010, and the sky's the limit after that. As for Dana Corporation, it got more in the deal as well - the right to hire new workers at half the wages of current ones so older employees can be phased out and replaced with low-cost new ones.

The same UAW - company pattern is now in play at GM, Chrysler and Ford. GM workers struck September 24 and returned to work two days later after union negotiators agreed to huge concessions the company demanded and got without breaking a sweat. Workers accepted the proposal by a nearly two to one margin, but in doing it signed away their futures with a deal they'll live to regret. They traded shaky job security today for big contractual givebacks later. The pact affects 73,000 hourly workers at GM's 82 US facilities, and key to it is a VEBA agreement for the UAW henceforth to manage GM's 400,000 retirees' health benefits while letting the company off the hook for what it's been providing since 1964. The GM VEBA amounts to a multi-billion dollar trust fund that will transform the union into a major health care provider, and allow it to reap huge profits by cutting its own members' benefits.

For its part, GM is only obligated to contribute $35 billion of the $55 billion it owes retirees. But the deal is even sweeter than that. Health care costs are soaring, and the company's have risen by nearly half since 2003. It's clear what's ahead. The VEBA employee experience at Detroit Diesel and Caterpillar is coming to GM. When funds in it run out, the UAW will cut benefits and hike premiums and co-pays so union profits aren't affected. The agreement also lets GM divert pension fund money to the VEBA trust and allows for worker cost of living increases to go instead toward retiree health benefit expenses making the deal even worse.

Other terms agreed to in the contract include a two-tiered wage and benefit package. Under it, new skilled assembly-line workers will get $26 to $32 in hourly wages but less in benefits than current ones for a total compensation package of around $45 an hour compared to about $73 an hour for existing skilled workers. In addition, a new non-core worker group, comprising up to one-third of GM's workforce, will get around $27 an hour in wages and benefits. Both core and non-core employees will henceforth receive less in active-worker-health-care benefits with GM saving billions from the arrangement.

The company told Wall Street investors October 15 its 2007 labor costs will drop from $12.6 billion last year to $10.1 billion in 2007 (45% below 2003 wages and benefits paid) with "significant" further declines from 2008 to 2011. Further, GM estimates it will reduce its long-term healthcare obligation to workers by $47 billion and expects over the next four years to retire up to 75% of its current high-paid work force (earning $78.21 in wages and benefits) and replace many of them with low-paid non-core, non-assembly line new hires (costing $25.65 in combined wages and benefits).

Employee buyouts, early retirement offers and other downsizing efforts are coming that will let the company eliminate expensive workers and replace them with cheaper new ones. The contract runs four years and includes three lump-sum bonuses but no wage increases so annual cost of living adjustments won in 1948 are ended that over time will cost workers much more.

It's a dark new age for GM workers as well as for those at Chrysler and Ford. The days of Walter Reuther-type leadership are long gone. He led the UAW from 1946 until his death in 1970, grew the union to more than 1.5 million members, and over that time delivered for the rank and file like few other labor leaders ever did. He was a union reformer, shrewd bargainer, master strategist, champion of industrial democracy and worker rights and once said "If fighting for a more equal and equitable distribution of the wealth of this country is socialistic, I stand guilty of being a socialist." In fact, he was pro-capitalist, opposed forming a labor party and allied the UAW to the Democrat party and its imperialist agenda.

Nonetheless, he won sizable wage increases and a historic tying of them to living costs and productivity gains. He also got his membership paid vacations, employer-funded pensions, medical insurance with defined benefits, improved safety and health measures, and supplemental unemployment benefits that guaranteed members up to 95% of their pay if they were laid off. That's now lost today with UAW and other union bosses conspiring with business for their own self-interest at the expense of their members.

The UAW Chrysler betrayal was as cynical and self-serving as the GM deal. It was packaged around a staged six hour partial walkout of 37,000 of the company's 49,000 work force that was more theater than strike action and another defeat for UAW members unless they reject the agreement as some locals are doing in voting so far. Some local union leaders oppose it as well as the terms agreed to are even more draconian than at GM:

-- a new VEBA trust (only for current employees) with Chrysler contributing only $8.8 billion of its $18 billion long-term health care obligation to its 78,000 retirees; new hires will get no retirement health care benefits and will have to enroll in a new health care program that will increase deductibles, co-pays and other out-of-pocket expenses; current retirees for the first time will have to pay out-of-pocket expenses; savings to the company will exceed $300 million a year;

-- a two-tiered wage and benefit arrangement with new skilled hires getting as little as $14 an hour or half or less the current pay rate and well below the $19.62 average non-union wage in the manufacturing sector; the agreement lets the company expand the number of low-paid non-core workers as well as be able to designate "Non-Core Facilities" in which the entire workforce will get lower pay and benefits once current employees are phased out;

-- new health care concessions similar to what GM and Ford got in 2005 that require retirees to pay part of their rising health care premiums; current worker pension funds will be shifted to the VEBA;

-- the elimination of employer-paid pensions for new workers, replacing them with 401(k) plans in which the company will contribute one dollar to be invested in the stock market for every hour worked;

-- freedom for Chrysler's private equity firm owner, Cerberus Capital, to downsize and close as many of its plants as it wishes with early retirement offers and employee buyouts ahead so expensive current workers can be eliminated;

-- workers' wages will be frozen, and the Cost of Living Adjustment (COLA) benefit won in the two month 1970 GM strike is now lost;

-- more flexibility for the company to outsource jobs to non-UAW workers at lower pay and benefits; these will include so-called "housekeeping functions" like janitorial and trash handling, grounds keeping, machine and booth cleaning and others;

-- freedom for the company to expand the number of low-paid, low-benefit part-time workers as well as long-term temporary ones who can't gain seniority;

-- the company freed of any commitment to build vehicles at US assembly plants or guarantee the number of jobs at them plus other thus far unreported worker concessions.

The GM, Chrysler and upcoming Ford negotiations herald a new day for UAW workers in the wake of another crushing defeat affecting all working Americans. Gone are one million UAW jobs since 1978 (from 1.5 million to 520,000) along with hard-won gains that took decades to achieve. No longer do men like Walter Reuther represent workers. Today's UAW leadership betrayed its members trust for its own self-interest, and there's no relief in sight for change. Overall, organized labor is on its knees and Wall Street loves it. GM stock alone rose over 5% the day its deal was announced.

Looking ahead, there are no easy answers, just tough choices, and job one for working people is to join in solidarity for their own self-interest and survival. Past successes can be regained, but wishing won't make it so. A new political movement is needed based on social equity and justice with a new breed of leaders to head it. The odds for success are long, but the alternative is intolerable. That should be incentive enough to go for it.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at [e-mail].

Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to The Steve Lendman News and Information Hour on TheMicroEffect.com Mondays at noon US central time.
From: sjlendman.blogspot.com/
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The author above mentions Upton Sinclair's book "The Jungle." I was going to use that very same reference when introducing the following article. As an ex-Microbiologist and Sanitarian for various food industries.....I can't believe this! Oh, I'm not surprised by the rodent head in the can of beans, mishaps can occur, although this is indicative of decreasing regulations by the FDA [thank-you Bush regime]. But rather, the thing I find so shocking is the company's reply to the incident. How smug can you get?! In the past, they would be begging for the public's forgiveness, not accusing the victim of ruining the company's reputation, which by the way would have been totally sunk as would the continuation of the company itself for such an obvious lack of Good Maufacturing Practices which a mandatory investigation would have revealed! The U.S. used to have the safest food production in the world.....Welcome back to the Jungle!....M

Rodent head in your green beans? No problem, canner says - it's 'commercially sterile'
By Brianna Lange
The Salt Lake Tribune
Article Last Updated: 10/05/2007 01:17:22 PM MDT

Marianne Watson of Lehu, UT had quite a surprise when... (Danny Chan La/The Salt Lake Tribune )«1» A rodent head found by a Lehi woman in a can of green beans would be safe to eat, the company's spokesman said Thursday. But Marianne Watson, the woman who found the head in the can bought from a Wal-Mart store, rejected a $100 settlement that Allen Canning offered her if she signed a liability release.
"There's no way that product could have hurt her," Allen Canning spokesman James Phillips said in a telephone interview. "This rodent was rendered commercially sterile. We cook each can individually at a temperature up to 265 degrees."
Even so, Phillips said the rat head wouldn't be welcome at his home. "I'd hate to even think about seeing the same thing on my kitchen table."
Watson bought the can from the American Fork Wal-Mart store on Sept. 28. On Sunday, when she opened the can to prepare lunch for her family, she found the rodent head.
The Arkansas-based company called the check it sent Watson a "gesture of good will," but assured her that it was not an admission of liability.
"It's a $100 bribe," Watson said. "It's insulting, and I felt they were disingenuous. I feel like they're asking me to view them as good farmers, but they're just protecting their tails."
Phillips says that Watson isn't the victim, though.
"You can be assured that the people who've been hurt by this is us. She's trying to ruin us through the media."
Watson said that she still will not pursue legal action.
In a letter to Watson, the company asked that she send the head to a lab to be tested. Watson says she may send it to a lab, but not the one recommended by the company.
Phillips says that the incident is rare and that the company produces millions of cans a year.
"If you would calculate the frequency of this on a calculator, it wouldn't fit because the number's so small," said Phillips.
Still, the case is not the first time a complaint about animal parts in Allen's green beans has been made public. In 2005, The Northwest Herald in McHenry County, Ill., reported that a woman found an amphibian leg in a can of Allen's green beans. Brenda Eisenberg of Spring Grove found the leg in November 2005. Allen's offered her $25, a gift pack and a cookbook.
Watson says she made the incident public to prevent others experiencing the same thing. She advises those who have purchased Allen's green beans to check the label for the tainted batch number: 34CG262162.
Allen's regrets that the incident happened.
"Were we disappointed? Absolutely. Do we want these things to happen? Absolutely not. But when they do happen, we try to respond," said Phillips.

[e-mail]
Source:
www.sltrib.com//ci_7089145?IADID=Search-www.sltrib.com-www.sltrib.com

[michelle]

Living paycheck to paycheck gets harder
THIS IS THE TIME TO RISE UP!!!

My kid and I are eatin' baloney sandwiches till the end of the month!....Michelle

LISTEN WHILE YOU READ: tinyurl.com/2v3nzs

This Is The Time - Solidarity Rocks
This is the time to build our union, to organize, to fight injustice, to mobilize. Written by Frank Romano of the United Steelworkers of America and performed by the Solidarity Rocks Band

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Living paycheck to paycheck gets harder
By ANNE D'INNOCENZIO, AP Business Writer
Fri Oct 19, 7:51 PM ET

NEW YORK - The calculus of living paycheck to paycheck in America is getting harder. What used to last four days might last half that long now. Pay the gas bill, but skip breakfast. Eat less for lunch so the kids can have a healthy dinner.

Across the nation, Americans are increasingly unable to stretch their dollars to the next payday as they juggle higher rent, food and energy bills. It's starting to affect middle-income working families as well as the poor, and has reached the point of affecting day-to-day calculations of merchants like Wal-Mart Stores Inc., 7-Eleven Inc. and Family Dollar Stores Inc.

Food pantries, which distribute foodstuffs to the needy, are reporting severe shortages and reduced government funding at the very time that they are seeing a surge of new people seeking their help.

While economists debate whether the country is headed for a recession, some say the financial stress is already the worst since the last downturn at the start of this decade.

From Family Dollar to Wal-Mart, merchants have adjusted their product mix and pricing accordingly. Sales data show a marked and more prolonged drop in spending in the days before shoppers get their paychecks, when they buy only the barest essentials before splurging around payday.

"It's pretty pronounced," said Kiley Rawlins, a spokeswoman at Family Dollar. "It seems like to us, customers are running out of food products, paper towels sooner in the month."

Wal-Mart, the world's largest retailer, said the imbalance in spending before and after payday in July was the biggest it has ever seen, though the drop-off wasn't as steep in August.

And 7-Eleven says its grocery sales have jumped 12-13 percent over the past year, compared with only slight increases for non-necessities like gloves and toys. Shoppers can't afford to load up at the supermarket and are going to the most convenient places to buy emergency food items like milk and eggs.

"It even costs more to get the basics like soap and laundry detergent," said Michelle Grassia, who lives with her husband and three teenage children in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, N.Y.

Her husband's check from his job at a grocery store used to last four days. "Now, it lasts only two," she said.

To make up the difference, Grassia buys one gallon of milk a week instead of three. She sometimes skips breakfast and lunch to make sure there's enough food for her children. She cooks with a hot plate because gas is too expensive. And she depends more than ever on the bags of free vegetables and powdered milk from a local food pantry.

Grassia's story is neither new nor unique. With the fastest-rising food and energy prices since the 1980s, low-income consumers are stretching their budgets by eating cheap foods like peanut butter and pasta.

Industry analysts and some economists fear the strain will get worse as people are hit with higher home heating bills this winter and mortgage rates go up.

It's bad enough already for 85-year-old Dominica Hoffman.

She gets $1,400 a month in pension and Social Security from her days in the garment industry. After paying $500 in rent on an apartment in Pennsauken, N.J., and shelling out money for food, gas and other expenses, she's broke by the end of the month. She's had to cut fruits and vegetables from her grocery order — and that's even with financial help from her children.

"Everything is up," she said.

Many consumers, particularly those making less than $30,000 a year, are cutting spending on nutritious food like milk and vegetables, and analysts fear they're further skimping on basic medical care and other critical services.

Coupon-clipping just isn't enough.

"The reality of hunger is right here," said the Rev. Melony Samuels, director of The BedStuy Campaign against Hunger, a church-affiliated food pantry in Brooklyn.

The pantry scrambled to feed 5,000 new families over the past 12 months, up almost 70 percent from 3,000 the year before.

"I am shocked to see such numbers," Samuels said, "and I am really concerned that this is just the beginning of what we are going to see."

In the past three months, Samuels has seen more clients in higher-paying jobs — the $35,000 range — line up for food.

The Regional Food Bank of Northeastern New York, which covers 23 counties in New York State, cited a 30 percent rise in visitors in the first nine months of this year, compared with 2006.

Maureen Schnellmann, senior director of food and nutrition programs at the American Red Cross Food Pantry in Boston, reported a 30 percent increase from January through August over last year.

Until a few months ago, Dellria Seales, a home care assistant, was just getting by living with her daughter, a hairdresser, and two grandchildren in a one-bedroom apartment for $750 a month. But a knee injury in January forced her to quit her job, leaving her at the mercy of Samuels' pantry because most of her daughter's $1,200 a month income goes to rent, energy and food costs.

"I need it. Without it, we wouldn't survive," Seales said as she picked up carrots and bananas.

John Vogel, a professor at Dartmouth College's Tuck School of Business, worries that the squeeze will lead to a less nutritious diet and inadequate medical or child care.

In the meantime, rising costs show no signs of abating.

Gas prices hit a record nationwide average of $3.23 per gallon in late May before receding a little, though prices are expected to soar again later this year. Food costs have increased 4.5 percent over the past 12 months, partly because of higher fuel costs. Egg prices were 44 percent higher, while milk was up 21.3 percent over the past 12 months to nearly $4 a gallon, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The average family of four is spending anywhere from $7 to $10 extra a week — $40 more a month — on groceries alone, compared to a year ago, according to retail consultant Burt Flickinger III.

And while overall wage growth is a solid 4.1 percent over the past 12 months, economists say the increases are mostly for the top earners.

Retailers started noticing the strain in late spring and early summer as they were monitoring the spending around the paycheck cycle.

Wal-Mart and Family Dollar key on the first week of the month, when government checks like Social Security and public assistance generally hit consumers' mailboxes.

7-Eleven, whose customers are more diverse, looks at paycheck cycles in specific markets dominated by a major employer, such as General Motors in Detroit, to discern trends in shopping.

To economize, shoppers are going for less expensive food.

"They're buying more peanut butter and pasta. And they're going for hamburger meat," Flickinger, the retail consultant, said. "They're trying to outsmart the store by looking for deep discounts at the end of the month."

He said the last time he saw this was 2000-2001, when the dot-com bubble burst and the economy went into a recession after massive layoffs.

For now, low-price retailers are readjusting their merchandising and pricing.

Wal-Mart is becoming more aggressive on discounting. It announced Thursday it is expanding price cuts to 15,000 items, ranging from Motts apple juice and Progresso soups to women's fleece tops, heading into the holidays.

Family Dollar, whose food offerings were limited to candy and snacks until two years ago, has expanded its mix of groceries like fruit cups, cereal and such refrigerated items as milk and ice cream while cutting back on shoes. This summer the chain began accepting food stamps.

Food pantries are also getting creative. Samuels said her church, Full Gospel Tabernacle of Faith, just started offering free cooking classes to teach clients who are diabetic or have other health conditions how to prepare vegetables like squash. It's also offering free exercise classes.

"We are trying to make them health conscious," Samuels said. "It's not right to give them just anything. Our mantra is eat well and live well."
___

Associated Press Writers Geoff Mulvihill in Mount Laurel, N.J., and Terry Tang in Phoenix, Ariz., contributed to this report.

Source: tinyurl.com/2bjohx

[michelle]

John Edwards Statement on Peru Trade Agreement
October 27, 2007

Today I am announcing my opposition to the Peru Trade Agreement negotiated by the Bush Administration and being considered for approval by Congress. Despite strong efforts by many Democrats in Congress, labor organizations and fair trade advocates to embed international labor standards into the Agreement, what resulted were references to general principles and not specific standards. And the Agreement still replicates and in fact expands all of the other most damaging aspects of past trade agreements. In short, this agreement does not meet my standard of putting American workers and communities first, ahead of the interests of the big multinational corporations, which for too long have rigged our trade policies for themselves and against American families.

For far too long, presidents from both parties have entered into trade agreements, agreements like NAFTA in 1994 and the WTO in 1995, promising in each case that they would create millions of new jobs and trade surpluses. Instead, since these agreements were put into place we have lost millions of manufacturing jobs, seen wages decline, and storied U.S. firms close - and towns all over this country have been devastated. And we have run up larger and larger trade deficits. This irresponsible squandering of our national wealth now makes it increasingly difficult for us to control our own destiny.

NAFTA, which was one of our worst trade agreements ever, was written by corporate interests and insiders in all three countries, and it has served them well. But it absolutely hasn't served the interests of regular workers in any of the three countries. When NAFTA was passed, the American people were promised that by 2006 U.S. exports to Mexico would exceed Mexican imports by $10 billion. But right now, hundreds of thousands of lost American jobs later, Mexican imports are $70 billion more than U.S. exports to Mexico. And Mexican workers have lost too - average wages for Mexican workers have declined since NAFTA was passed.

Right now, President Bush is pushing to expand this NAFTA approach to four more countries. He has signed agreements with Peru, Panama, Korea and even Colombia, where since 1991, in this tiny country, there have been over 2100 documented cases of trade unionists being assassinated, 72 in 2006 alone.

All of these agreements replicate these terrible features of NAFTA:

All of these agreements provide the expansive investor rights that literally create incentives to relocate U.S. jobs overseas;
All of these agreements limit our ability to inspect imported food - even as the International Trade Commission projects that these pacts will result in a new flood of imported food;
All of these agreements allow foreign corporations operating here to attack our environmental, health and even local zoning laws in foreign tribunals to demand our tax dollars in compensation if following our laws undermines their expected profits.
All of these agreements even limit how we can spend our own tax dollars. These deals ban many Buy America and other similar policies. Instead of your tax dollars going to support American workers, these agreements take away one the few opportunities the government has to directly create jobs here.
But these four proposed agreements actually go even further than NAFTA.

For instance, these deals give those foreign corporations who get contracts to rebuild our nation's bridges and highways or to operate mines or cut timber on U.S. federal land special privileges superior to the treatment of U.S. firms. U.S. firms have to meet our laws, but in contrast, these agreements let foreign corporations operating within the United States who have a gripe about their contract terms drag the U.S. government into foreign tribunals stacked with their own lawyers acting as ‘judges.'

The damage threatened by these NAFTA expansion agreements extends beyond the United States. Buried deep in the 800-page text of the Peru FTA are ambiguous provisions that could allow U.S. banks to demand compensation if Peru reverses its disastrous social security privatization. That's right, the Peru FTA could lock in the misery facing millions of the elderly and ill in that extremely poor country all to ensure U.S. firms can profit on what should be a government service available to all in the first place.

The Peru, Panama and Colombia agreements are also projected to displace millions of peasant farmers. This would be a major human tragedy. We saw how NAFTA's similar agriculture rules destroyed the livelihoods of 1.3 million peasant farmers with hunger increasing and desperate migration to the United States jumping 60 percent since NAFTA.

This is not just morally wrong, it is bad foreign policy. The United States needs to rebuild its friendships in Latin America, not push corporate trade agreements that undermine the livelihoods of the region's poorest residents.

The presidents of Peru's labor unions oppose this NAFTA expansion. So does Peru's Archbishop Pedro Barreto, who calls the NAFTA expansion into Peru immoral - and a threat to the national security of his nation and ours.

For too long, Washington has been looking at every trade deal and asking one, and only one, question - is it good for corporate profits? And they haven't looked at all at the harm it will do to workers, their wages, or to the U.S. economy.

What we need instead is trade based on what is good for America. And we need to act on deeply held principles and not, as the Washington Post said in a recent editorial, on "opportunism under pressure".

I believe we need to follow four principles to make sure that globalization works for everyone, starting right here at home.

First, our multilateral and bilateral trade deals and unilateral trade preferences must help America. They must benefit American workers and their communities. This means they must:

Stick to trade and not meddle with our domestic Buy America laws, our nation's investment policies, and our food safety and health laws;
Have at their core strong protections for the global environment and basic labor standards, such as prohibiting sweatshops and child labor and protecting the right of workers to join unions; and
Include prohibitions against illegal subsidies and currency manipulation and other trade cheating of the sort that is in fact encouraged under most of our current trade deals.

Second, our trade policies must also lift up workers around the world. Making sure that workers around the globe are treated fairly and share in the gains of trade is the right thing to do morally, it's the right thing to do economically, and it will make us here in America safer and more secure. We can never again condone trade agreements with countries where there is violence against workers or they are denied just wages and working conditions.

Third, we must understand in negotiating trade agreements that "one size does not fit all". We need to be realistic about global differences in form of government, in the rule of law, in the relative state of countries' economies, and in the day-to-day trade and business practices of potential trading partners. How utterly foolish is it that we treat China with its massive controlled and manipulated economy, Mexico with its porous three thousand mile-long border with the U.S., and developing countries in South America and Africa, as all the same when it comes to trade?

Fourth, our trade deals must be fairly and fully administered. For free trade to be fair, it must be based on rules, and then those rules must be followed. The top prosecutors at the Department of Justice should be responsible for enforcing our trade agreements, and when I am president I will insist that they prosecute all cases of illegal foreign subsidies, currency manipulation, and unfair trade practices.

Some of the folks who still defend our failed status quo trade policies want to avoid discussions about the vital changes that are needed. Here's a preview of what they will say about these common sense suggestions: they will attack my smart trade vision for America as being protectionist or anti-trade. They are dead wrong.

I absolutely believe in fair free trade, and I always will, since fair free trade creates jobs for Americans and fairness in the global economy. I do not, however, believe in trade that only helps multinational corporations and that hurts American workers and America.

And so it is that looking ahead, as I am opposed to the Peru Trade Agreement, I intend to also oppose the Colombia, Panama and South Korea Trade Agreements in their present forms.

Source: www.art-us.org/node/282
Well alright, Mr. Edwards!!!!....M
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Stop Peru FTA
By Tom Loudon, Alliance for Responsible Trade
October 30, 2007

We are calling on PDA activists to act swiftly to stop the unpopular and undemocratic expansion of NAFTA called the Peru Free Trade Agreement (FTA). It is expected to come up for a vote in the next week.

In spite of the widespread opposition to “free trade” policies demonstrated in the 2006 elections, key Democrats including Representatives Pelosi, Rangel and Levin have yet again betrayed the will of the electorate. Anxious to appease corporate funders, they are siding with the Bush Administration to push this agreement, which will further devastate workers and poor farmers in both countries. We must send them a clear message that their future in Congress depends on pleasing us--not ADM, Cargill, Monsanto, Dow and the pharmaceutical companies.

This weekend, the corporate Democrats' strategy for a quiet passage of the Peru FTA was complicated by Senator Edwards declaration of his opposition to all four of the pending FTAs with Peru, Panama, Colombia and South Korea. We must take full advantage of this unexpected opening and expose all members of Congress who plan to vote for this NAFTA expansion.

You can be a part of a nationwide effort to stop this from passing, but you must act quickly:

Call your representative and ask them to oppose the Peru FTA.

Together we will put Congress on notice that we are watching as they choose between corporate profits and the interests of workers and the environment.

PDA is joined in this effort by many organizations, including:
Alliance for Responsible Trade, American Friends Service Committee, Campaign for Labor Rights,
Council of Canadians, London Chapter--Canada Global Exchange, Grassroots Global Justice (see GGJ statement on trade), Jobs with Justice (Portland, OR), Maryknoll office for Global Concerns, National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights , NYC People's Referendum on Free Trade, Portland Central America Solidarity Committee, Student Trade Justice Campaign, United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE) Witness for Peace, World Hunger Year (WHY]

Source:
pdamerica.org/articles/news/2007-10-30-11-51-57-news.php
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
TAKE ACTION HERE. CALL YOUR REPRESENTATIVE:

Action Alert

Fair Trade NOT Free Trade--STOP Peru FTA

Call Now

This week Congress will likely vote to pass the Peru Free Trade Agreement. Many Democrats support this flawed legislation, which hurts workers and the environment in Peru and in the U.S.

As part of the National Call-In Week to Stop the Peru FTA, Oct. 29-Nov. 2 , please call your representative, today.

Use the provided script, or refer to it for talking points.

If you're ready to make your call, click on call now, then insert your zip code in the box and hit go.

Go To:
capwiz.com/pdamerica/callalert/index.tt?alertid=10491961&PROCESS=Call+Now

[michelle]

Here's a follow-up to:
Re: Labor Solidarity
« Reply #17 on Jul 28, 2007, 5:19pm »
Global Uniform Justice for all Workers vs Big Business
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Jury awards damages to Central American Dole workers
By D. Lencho
23 November 2007

A jury in Los Angeles Superior Court has awarded close to $6 million to six workers in a lawsuit against corporate giants Dole Fresh Fruit Co. and Dow Chemical Co. The suit was filed in 2004 by 12 Central American men who worked at a Dole banana plantation in Nicaragua during the 1970s. The workers claimed they were made sterile by exposure to a Dow pesticide used by Dole.

On November 5, the jury found in favor of six of the plaintiffs and awarded them $3.3 million in compensatory damages. The following week, on November 15, the jury awarded $2.5 million in punitive damages to five of those six workers.

Another co-defendant, Amvac Chemical Corp., had settled for $300,000 before the trial.

The pesticide, dibromochloropropane, or DBCP, is used to kill microscopic worms on the roots of the banana trees. In the 1970s, a number of workers who worked with DBCP at Dow’s processing plant in Midland, Michigan, were diagnosed as sterile. However, under the threat of a breach of contract suit, Dow continued to supply Dole’s foreign operations with DBCP. It was eventually banned in 1977 due to findings that it caused cancer in animals and sterility in humans.

The jury found that Dole failed to provide the six workers with information or protective gear, thus maliciously harming them. The jury also agreed with the allegation that Dole failed to follow guidelines and applied the DBCP improperly and in excessive amounts. Dole was ordered to shoulder the entire punitive damages assessment, since the judge had declared Dow not liable for punitive damages.

Both sides in the case claimed victory. Duane Miller, the workers’ attorney, called it “a tremendous victory” and said that it would send a message to corporations about accountability. Another lawyer for the workers, Antonio Hernandez Ordeñana, said, “What really matters is that Dole sterilized these peasants and thousands more humble Nicaraguan peasants, and in the rest of Central America, and we proved it.”

Dow’s lawyer, Gennaro “Gus” Filice, voiced Dow’s pleasure that the jury “concluded that six of the twelve plaintiffs were entitled to no recovery whatsoever.” Rick McKnight, who defended Dole, called the verdict “a substantial defeat” for the plaintiffs and “quite a vindication” of Dole.

The award amount is actually very low given the damages and the size of Dole and Dow. USC law professor Clare Pastore told the Los Angeles Times, “Dole got out of this very cheaply. It has the potential to be a blockbuster case, and it didn’t turn out that way.”

In a press release following the punitive damages decision, Dole executive vice president Michael Carter claimed that “we are happy with the jury’s findings as they relate to six of the twelve hand-picked plaintiffs.” He then railed against the other six “flat wrong” verdicts, claiming that they were based on “junk science, raw emotional appeals and false testimony.” He further stated that Dole will appeal the verdicts “to set the record straight.”

The record, in fact, is already quite “straight.” This suit is neither the first nor the last brought against Dole regarding its use of DBCP. Over the last two decades, courts in Nicaragua have levied $600 million in compensatory damages against Dole in favor of banana workers. The workers have had little success in collecting the damages, which was the main reason for bringing the case to the US.

Last December, Dole announced that it had settled 16 of 25 lawsuits brought against it. One of the cases in the settlement had been scheduled to go to trial in Galveston, Texas, in January 2007, and would have set a precedent for being the first such case to be tried in a US court. That distinction instead went to the Los Angeles lawsuit.

Additionally, there are four other lawsuits involving thousands of affected Central American workers that have been filed in Los Angeles alone. In spite of the meager amount of this particular judgment, Dole’s determination to appeal the case and fight any other lawsuits vigorously in US courts must be seen in this light.

The case could have ramifications for workers around the world. A November 12 article by Loretta Tofani in the Salt Lake Tribune explored the possibility of Chinese workers bringing lawsuits against US businesses that contract with Chinese manufacturers. Millions of Chinese who work with toxic chemicals (such as lead-based paint) in under- or unregulated factories have already suffered from fatal occupational diseases such as silicosis and leukemia and other cancers. Many have suffered maiming and amputations of limbs due to outmoded, unsafe machinery.

Tofani quotes a Seattle-based attorney, Dan Harris, as saying, “Chinese law firms are gathering up plaintiffs now, looking for products that cause harm.” Referring to the effects of globalization on corporate liability and the laws that presumably govern it, Harris says, “It’s going to take a lot of cases before this works out.”

Source:
www.wsws.org/articles/2007/nov2007/dole-n23.shtml

[michelle]

Chinese Labor Activist Brutally Assaulted in Shenzhen

Shenzhen labor activist Huang Qingnan was stabbed November 21. This is not the first attack on Huang. In 1999, then a rank-and-file activist in a food factory, Huang was permanently disfigured when acid was thrown on his face while he slept in the factory dormitory. PHOTO CAPTION

Workers’ rights advocates are calling on the Chinese government to investigate a ruthless November 21 knife attack on a prominent labor activist in Shenzhen, a major manufacturing center in southern China.

Huang Qingnan works for the Dagongzhe Migrant Workers Center, a small group that counsels workers on their legal rights. The center has helped low-paid factory workers file hundreds of claims for injuries and unfair dismissals. Employers have been held liable for large amounts of severance pay, and it is assumed that an employer is behind the attack.

In broad daylight, as Huang chatted with a friend on a Shenzhen street, he was assaulted by two attackers who slashed him in the back, waist, and leg. His left leg was nearly severed and it appears that he may lose the use of it. Supporters are raising money for the operations needed, estimated to cost $27,000.

The Dagongzhe offices had been attacked twice in the previous six weeks by men wielding steel bars. Windows, furniture, and equipment were smashed. Police stood nearby during the attacks, and later told the center’s staffers that the attacks were not serious because no one was injured. The Dagongzhe staffers refused to back down from their work.

Five labor rights groups in Hong Kong denounced the attack on Huang and called on the government to find and prosecute the attackers.

Located just across the border from Hong Kong, Shenzhen is a city of 12 million that 20 years ago was a fishing village, a symbol of China’s dizzying economic growth. Its expansion was propelled by thousands of factories and millions of migrant workers who have flocked from rural areas to the city to produce toys, clothes, and electronics.

Please send donations for Huang Qingnan’s medical expenses via international wire transfer. (More on how to send an international wire transfer: www.ehow.com/how_2061302_do-international-wire-transfer.html ) The following details are required :

Bank account name: Worker Empowerment
Bank account number: 227-9-090365
Bank code: 024
Bank address: 83 Des Voeux Road, Central, Hong Kong
Swift code: HASE HKHH

Please e-mail to [e-mail] or call 852-9428-7640 for receipt or inquiry on donation.

Source: labornotes.org/node/1462

[michelle]

Slave labour that shames America
Migrant workers chained beaten and forced into debt, exposing the human cost of producing cheap food

You could write a letter to Burger King and Whole Foods on this one, folks....Look at the total price a one cent increase per pound of tomatoes would cost Burger King annually and their statement as to why they won't budge....Unbelieveable! I don't eat fast food, but I did shop at Whole Foods; they'll hear from me. Boycotts DO work; if you hit big business in the purse, they'll change policy. And these big businesses could send QA personnel to their farm suppliers to conduct unannounced inspections. So could the labor Department if they wanted to; they are aware of this shameful exploitation of human beings. ...Michelle

Slave labour that shames America
Migrant workers chained beaten and forced into debt, exposing the human cost of producing cheap food

By Leonard Doyle in Immokalee, Floride
Published: 19 December 2007

Three Florida fruit-pickers, held captive and brutalised by their employer for more than a year, finally broke free of their bonds by punching their way through the ventilator hatch of the van in which they were imprisoned. Once outside, they dashed for freedom.

When they found sanctuary one recent Sunday morning, all bore the marks of heavy beatings to the head and body. One of the pickers had a nasty, untreated knife wound on his arm. Police would learn later that another man had his hands chained behind his back every night to prevent him escaping, leaving his wrists swollen.

The migrants were not only forced to work in sub-human conditions but mistreated and forced into debt. They were locked up at night and had to pay for sub-standard food. If they took a shower with a garden hose or bucket, it cost them $5.

Their story of slavery and abuse in the fruit fields of sub-tropical Florida threatens to lift the lid on some appalling human rights abuses in America today.

Between December and May, Florida produces virtually the entire US crop of field-grown fresh tomatoes. Fruit picked here in the winter months ends up on the shelves of supermarkets and is also served in the country's top restaurants and in tens of thousands of fast-food outlets.

But conditions in the state's fruit-picking industry range from straightforward exploitation to forced labour. Tens of thousands of men, women and children – excluded from the protection of America's employment laws and banned from unionising – work their fingers to the bone for rates of pay which have hardly budged in 30 years.

Until now, even appeals from the former president Jimmy Carter to help raise the wages of fruit-pickers have gone unheeded. However, with Florida looming as a key battleground during the the next presidential election, there is hope that their cause will be raised by the Democratic candidates Barack Obama and John Edwards.

Fruit-pickers, who typically earn about $200 (£100) a week, are part of an unregulated system designed to keep food prices low and the plates of America's overweight families piled high. The migrants, largely Hispanic and with many of them from Mexico, are the last wretched link in a long chain of exploitation and abuse. They are paid 45 cents (22p) for every 32-pound bucket of tomatoes collected. A worker has to pick nearly two-and-a-half tons of tomatoes – a near impossibility – in order to reach minimum wage. So bad are their working and living conditions that the US Department of Labour, which is not known for its sympathy to the underdog, has called it "a labour force in considerable distress".

A week after the escapees managed to emerge from the van in which they had been locked up for the night, police discovered that a forced labour operation was supplying fruit-pickers to local growers. Court papers describe how migrant workers were forced into debt and beaten into going to work on farms in Florida, as well as in North and South Carolina. Detectives found another 11 men who were being kept against their will in the grounds of a Florida house shaded by palm trees. The bungalow stood abandoned this week, a Cadillac in the driveway alongside a black and chrome pick-up truck with a cowboy hat on the dashboard. The entire operation was being run by the Navarettes, a family well known in the area.

Also near by was the removals van from which Mariano Lucas, one of the first to escape, punched his way through a ventilation hatch to freedom in the early hours of 18 November. With him were Jose Velasquez, who had bruises on his face and ribs and a cut forearm, and Jose Hari. The men told police they had to relieve themselves inside the van. Other migrant workers were kept in other vehicles and sheds scattered around the garden.

Enslaved by the Navarettes for more than a year, the men had been working in blisteringly hot conditions, sometimes for seven days a week. Despite their hard work, they were mired in debt because of the punitive charges imposed by their employer, who is being held on minor charges while a grand jury investigates his alleged involvement in human trafficking.

The men had to pay to live in the back of vans and for food. Their entire pay cheques went to the Navarettes and they were still in debt. They slept in decrepit sheds and vehicles in a yard littered with rubbish. When one man did not want to go to work because he was sick, he was allegedly pushed and kicked by the Navarettes. "They physically loaded him in the van and made him go to work that day. Cesar, Geovanni and Martin Navarette beat him up and as a result he was bleeding in his mouth," a grand jury was told.

The complaint reveals that the men were forced to pay rent of $20 (£10) a week to sleep in a locked furniture van where they had no option but to urinate and defecate in a corner. They had to pay $50 a week for meals – mostly rice and beans with meat perhaps twice a week if they were lucky. The fruit-pickers' caravans, which they share with up to 15 other men, rent for $2,400 a month – more per square foot than a New York apartment – and are less than 10 minutes' walk from the hiring fair where the men show up before sunrise. At least half those who come looking for work are not taken on.

Florida has a long history of exploiting migrant workers. Farm labourers have no protection under US law and can be fired at will. Conditions have barely changed since 1960 when the journalist Edward R Murrow shocked Americans with Harvest Of Shame, a television broadcast about the bleak and underpaid lives of the workers who put food on their tables. "We used to own our slaves but now we just rent them," Murrow said, in a phrase that still resonates in Immokalee today.

For several years, a campaign has been under way to improve the workers' conditions. After years of talks, a scheme to pay the tomato pickers a penny extra per pound has been signed off by McDonald's, the world's biggest restaurant chain, and by Yum!, which owns 35,000 restaurants including KFC, Pizza Hut and Taco Bell. But Burger King, which also buys its tomatoes in Immokalee, has so far refused to participate, threatening the entire scheme.

"We see no legal way of paying these workers," said Steve Grover, the vice-president of Burger King. He complained that a local human rights group, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers "has gone after us because we are a known brand". But he added: "At the end of the day, we don't employ the farmworkers so how can we pay them?"

Burger King will not pay the extra penny a pound that the tomato-pickers are demanding he said. "If we agreed to the penny per pound, Burger King would pay about $250,000 annually, or $100 per worker. How does that solve exploitation and poverty?" he asked.

Burger King is not the only buyer digging in its heels. Whole Foods Market, which recently expanded into Britain with a store in London's upmarket suburb of Kensington, has been discovered stocking tomatoes from one of the most notorious Florida sweatshop producers. Whole Foods ignored an appeal by the Coalition of Immokalee Workers to pay an extra penny a pound for its tomatoes.

In a statement Whole Foods said it was "committed to supporting and promoting economically, environmentally, and socially sustainable agriculture" and supports "the right of all workers to be treated fairly and humanely."

The Democratic candidates for the presidency do not often talk about exploited migrant workers, but there are hints that Barack Obama will visit the Immokalee fruit pickers sometime before Florida's primary election on 5 February.

Jimmy Carter recently joined the campaign to improve the lot of fruit-pickers, appealing to Burger King and the growers "to restore the dignity of Florida's tomato industry". His appeal fell on deaf ears but 100 church groups, including the Catholic bishop of Miami, joined him.

Source: news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/article3263500.ece

[michelle]

For those who wait anxiously for the collapse of the U.S. economy and think the rest of the world will, somehow, escape the same fate, think again. Check out inflation rates in China and the effect on the working class....Workers are really getting angry; we're all in the same boat, folks, it's Big Business and the weathy that support them vs. labor; always has been, always will be unless we support each other as a global workforce....Michelle

Soaring inflation sparks social unrest in China
By Carol Divjak
28 December 2007

China’s annual inflation rate surged to an 11-year high of 6.9 percent in November, provoking protests by working people over rising food, fuel and housing costs and growing nervousness in Beijing over the prospects of further unrest.

Inflation started to surge from the middle of this year. In November, food prices rose by 18.2 percent on a year-on-year basis, following a 17.7 percent rise in October. Over the past 12 months, the price of pork, a staple meat in Chinese diets, has risen by a startling 54.9 percent. The price of cooking oil increased 34 percent, while vegetable prices rose 29.9 percent. Water, electricity and gas prices rose 5.6 percent. In a country where a large proportion of income is spent on food, these rises have hit working people hard.

In early December, the Chinese government’s annual top-level economic policy meeting decided to tighten the supply of money in order to curb “overheating”, amid fear of financial instability in the US. At the same time, Beijing announced a series of tax and subsidy measures to increase the domestic sale of grains and oil in an effort to contain soaring prices of basic consumer goods.

Many factors are fuelling inflation, including poor harvests in the world’s major crops-producing countries this year, rising international oil prices and disease among China’s pig population. A major source of inflation and “overheating” in China has been the injection of capital from the country’s large trade surplus. Chinese authorities have lifted interest rates five times and bank reserve ratios 10 times this year to rein in lending, with little impact.

The annual economic meeting took place amid a wave of strikes and protests. In late November, several thousand workers from Guangdong-based Alco Electronics staged a rally against rising food expenses being docked from their wages. Hundreds of police were called to break up the demonstration.

On December 10, according to the Hong Kong-based Information Centre for Human Rights and Democracy, 4,000 oil workers demonstrated for nearly a week at the Qilu Petrochemical Corp in Shandong province, demanding higher pay amid rising prices and record profits for the oil industry.

A worker in the plant told Reuters: “The protest started with the front-line workers who are having a very difficult life now, as pay increases very slowly but prices of everything rise so fast”. Another source said: “For a family of three with only one bread earner it is extremely tough.”

The protest gathered steam when former workers who had been laid off in 2001 from the partially privatised firm, joined the demonstration. The Hong Kong-based Ming Pao reported that some demonstrators distributed “anti-corruption” placards, demanding the sacking of the company’s chief.

The company is part of Sinopec, which is China’s second largest state-run oil corporation. It has reaped huge profits as oil prices skyrocketed to nearly $US100 a barrel, offsetting losses in the refining divisions. Yet, workers at the Qilu plant earn monthly wages of only 1,000-2,000 yuan ($US135-271).

The Wall Street Journal on December 12 warned of the danger of mass anti-government protests like those of 1989: “The trend this year is causing growing pain among the nation’s consumers and raises the spectre of the sort of destabilising, double-digit inflation that caused political unrest in China in the late 1980s and again plagued the economy in the mid 1990s.”

Xie Xiaomei, a 61-year-old retired factory worker in Shanghai, told the newspaper that her monthly income was just 1,000 yuan or $135. “In the past year, my salary rose less than 10 percent while [prices for] some products went up 50 percent.... I have no money see the doctor.” Her friend Xiao Yindi added: “We’d be better off returning to the times of Mao Zedong.”

Jiang Zhiguao, a migrant worker in Beijing, said prices of chilli peppers, which are commonly used in Hunan cuisine, had risen 40 percent this year, while “our salaries haven’t been raised.”

Chinese Academy of Social Sciences economist Yi Xianrong told Singapore’s Strait Times on December 7: “Beijing recognises the danger that an economic problem can turn into a political and social issue.” Beijing Institute of Technology economist Hu Xingdou said that on a recent trip to the eastern province of Zhejiang he had learnt that workers in many firms were expressing their anger through strikes and demands for higher wages.

The social tensions have found other expressions. Last month, three people were killed and 31 injured in a mad scramble to buy discount cooking oil in a French-owned Carrefour store in the city of Chongqing. The store was offering a discount of about $1.50 on 5 litre-bottles of oil. A similar stampede occurred on October 26 at a supermarket in Shanghai, injuring 15 people. These tragedies have compelled the commerce ministry to ban time-limited sales promotions.

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) regime has few mechanisms for influencing prices. The abolition of collective agriculture in the early 1980s left the authorities with no effective control over food supplies for an urban population that has vastly expanded. Attempts to contain price rises by increasing grain production have also been undermined by a severe drought in China and tight supplies internationally.

Although the CCP talks of increasing food supplies to bring prices down, little is said about lifting the chronically low level of wages. The CCP leadership has called for a greater role for state unions in negotiating wages with private business owners. The stated aim was to allow wages to increase with inflation, but the hard reality is ruthless capitalist exploitation.

According to a new report on China’s “corporate competitiveness” by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, workers’ wages as a proportion of gross domestic product (GDP) have decreased from 53.4 percent in 1990 to 41.4 percent in 2005—even though the economy has grown six times larger. The profit share, by contrast, increased from 21.9 percent to 29.6 percent. “It can be said that, the large increases in corporate profits were largely achieved at the price of paying low wages to the employees,” the report admitted.

Even the official Workers Daily acknowledged on December 17 that the “rising tide did not lift all boats”. “Some enterprises used various means to violate employees’ legal rights in order to lower the costs of production. For example, profits are surging, but employers refuse to lift wages, they prolong working hours, refuse to pay pension premiums for employees, have no housing super funds and use large numbers of casual but low-paid labour, etc. In order to retain scarce jobs, workers in disadvantaged positions have no choice but to bow down their heads before the bosses,” the article stated.

A 2005 survey by the state-run All China Federation of Trade Unions found that in 2002-2004, 81.8 percent of workers earned below the average wage in their local regions—34.2 percent earned half the average and 12.7 percent received less than the minimum wage. The figures indicate the huge disparity between the incomes of the majority of working people and those of the wealthiest layers of society.

University students are no better off. A Communist Youth League survey found that among graduates of 2005, 66.1 percent expected jobs paying only 1,000-2,000 yuan a month, similar to a factory worker’s wage, with 1.58 percent willing to accept a “zero wage” initially. At the same time, however, 77.3 percent of employers thought the college students “expected too much”.

Chinese workers are especially sensitive to inflation because of the wholesale destruction of public housing, healthcare, education and pensions in 1990s. Personal consumption significantly contracted from 48.8 percent of GDP in 1991 to 38.2 percent in 2005. Workers and the rural poor have to save considerable sums for illness and other emergencies and spend less on basic items.

The latest protests over price rises are one more indication that the immense social explosion brewing in China, as the regime’s pro-market policies deepen the gulf between rich and poor.

Source: www.wsws.org/articles/2007/dec2007/chin-d28.shtml
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------And here's what we in the United States receive for product quality when we import from China.....I'm NOT buying items from China even if it means going without something; I made it through Christmas gift giving without buying 'Made in China' and so are many other people....and that sure as hell isn't going to help Chinese inflation as more Americans wake up to the following:

Imports Cause Consumer Safety Concern

It has been a long time coming, but now the mass media and even the “look-the-other-way” Food and Drug Administration (FDA) are focusing on a stream of Chinese imports that are contaminated or defective.

After years of warnings about farm-raised seafood imports from the Chinese mainland, the FDA’s Dr. David Acheson, in charge of food protection, said: “There’s been a continued pattern of violations with no signs of abatement.” So, finally, the FDA in late June blocked the sale of shrimp, frozen eel, catfish, basa and dace. The reasons included carcinogens and too many antibiotic residues.

Crowded into ponds, farmed Chinese fish are breeding grounds for disease, lice and contaminated water. So heavy doses of antibiotics and other food additives—many illegal in the U.S.—are applied. China is a major exporter of seafood to the U.S. We import 80% of all our seafood.

In recent weeks, disclosures of hundreds of thousands of defective tires (tread separation problems), lead-coated toys, contaminated toothpaste and pet food (which destroyed about 6000 pets) have raised the profile of a situation which is likely to get worse.

China produces products in a horrifically polluted environment—of the water, air and soil. Industrial chemicals, farm run-offs, mountains of toxic waste are alarming Beijing for both domestic consumption as well as foreign trade reasons. Despite loud proclamations of forthcoming action, the Chinese government has waited too long, allowed too much corruption and lax enforcement, and condoned a huge industry in exported counterfeit goods where anything goes.

Although country-of-origin legislation passed Congress in 2002, Mr. Bush—obsessed by the costly Iraq war and indentured to large corporate importers—did not push his Republicans in Congress to provide funds for enforcement. Instead, the president has signed into law delays in the labeling rule. Therefore, except for the required labeling of seafood from foreign countries (consumers take note), all other food in your supermarket is not required to have a label of the country that exported it. It is the majority Democrats’ job now to compel mandatory labeling of all imported foods.

China is the largest apple juice exporter in the world. Apple juice from China is pouring into the United States. Is there anything left that cannot be imported into what was once the greatest food exporter the world has ever seen?

It gets worse. The U.S. is on the verge of becoming a net food importer!

China has allies in the U.S.—the giant food processors that love to rely on profit-maximizing Chinese foodstuffs, additives and other ingredients. The large wholesalers and retail chains, like Wal-Mart, buffer the Chinese export machine from long overdue inspections and enforcement actions.

The inadequate budget of the FDA, and its fractured role with other federal agencies such as the U.S. Department of Agriculture, contributes to the failure of consumer protection. The FDA 2007 budget is only $1.5 billion, or one third of the price of just one aircraft carrier. That is not enough to defend the health and safety of the three hundred million Americans from hazardous drugs and foodstuffs.

Especially since the FDA has weak or non-existent enforcement powers to obtain information, keep records, demand recalls or impose effective fines.

Presently, the FDA is able to inspect about one percent of food shipments into the U.S. What can consumers do? Start yelling at your Senators and Representatives. This is one issue they are afraid to duck if the heat is on them. Second, buy from farmers and other producers near you, so you can skip the long chain of middlemen from China to your area who could have caught the problem but just pass the buck, so to speak.

Farmers markets from nearby farms are one way you can avoid contaminated imports.

Eighty percent of all children’s toys in America come from China. They come with too many hazards—burning, choking risks for small children, toxics in or on the toys. Some are recalled by the Consumer Product Safety Commission. You can be automatically notified of all CPSC recalls by registering with www.cpsc.gov/cpsclist.asp.

But, really, the fundamental responsibility here is with Beijing and Washington when careless or criminal companies fail their responsibilities. There needs to be a consumer safety treaty between the two countries where consumer needs are supreme.

Consumer groups and advocates in China need encouragement from their U.S. counterparts.

As far as those half a million or more replacement tires on the U.S. highways—already linked to two fatalities, the U.S. distributor in New Jersey says it doesn’t have enough money to recall them all. What about the Chinese exporter?

What is the U.S. Department of Transportation going to do about what will become more such defect-caused tragedies from a flood of auto parts and tires imported from China and other countries?

Source:
www.nader.org/index.php?/archives/1208-Imports-Cause-Consumer-Safety-Concern.html#extended

[michelle]

What you may not know about Dr. Martin Luther King
01/20/2008

Dear activists, colleagues and friends,

Today we honor Dr. King's birthday. We all know him because of his historic impact on civil rights, but many don't realize that later in life he fought just as passionately for the rights of workers and against the entrenched institutions of injustice.

"Equality means dignity. And dignity demands a job and a paycheck that lasts through the week."

The War on Greed is exactly this kind of fight. The livelihoods of families have been directly attacked by the actions of buyout billionaires like Henry Kravis putting Wall Street's special interests ahead of his 800,000 employees... and pocketing $51,000 an hour in the process.

Watch the video: warongreed.org/dreams.php?utm_source=rgemail

The first step must be taxing these buyout billionaires at a fair tax rate. It will not solve all the problems, but it is a strong and forceful beginning. With the presidential campaigns underway, it is the perfect time to force this issue into the campaigns the way we did with Wal-Mart and Iraq for Sale.

As our friend Rev. Yearwood, leader of the Hip Hop Caucus, has said: "We are facing a lunch counter moment for the 21st century."

Please join us at our virtual lunch counter by signing the petition to presidential candidates demanding they pledge to close the loopholes and tax the tax dodgers. Buyout billionaires are a menace to our economy. People are hurting, badly, and we must take beginning steps to bring the issue of corporate greed and economic equality to the nation's attention. [petition below]

Robert Greenwald
and the Brave New Films crew
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Tell the presidential candidates to pledge to close the buyout industry's tax loopholes
6,954 signers
Dear presidential candidates,

Buyout industry executives with multi-million dollar incomes have been exploiting a tax loophole that allows them to pay a lesser tax percentage rate than most of the workers in the companies they manage. This is a disgrace!

Make a pledge, if elected, that you will work to close the buyout industry's tax loopholes.

To Sign Petition, Go To: warongreed.org/dreams.php?utm_source=rgemail

[michelle]

Ark. man, others blame KBR for contaminants in Iraq
June 21, 2008, 3:20PM
Associated Press

WASHINGTON — An Arkansas man who worked as a contractor in Iraq says he lost his job after warning workers they were being exposed to a cancer-causing chemical there.

Ed Blacke, a former safety inspector for Houston-based contracting giant KBR, says his exposure to sodium dichromate in 2003 gave him chronic thyroid problems and early signs of cancer. He said supervisors initially ignored his warnings about contamination at the Qarmat Ali water injection plant near Basra, Iraq.

"In my mind, it was criminally negligent of (the company) to make a decision to continue to expose personnel to sodium dichromate poisoning," the Bella Vista, Ark., man told a congressional panel Friday.

KBR is formerly a subsidiary of Houston-based oilfield services giant Halliburton Co. It was not represented at the Democratic Policy Committee oversight hearing. The committee created by Senate Democratic leaders is comprised solely of Democrats and has no legislative authority.

A committee spokesman said the company, the largest U.S. contractor in Iraq, refused an invitation. A KBR spokeswoman later said safety and security of its employees is a top priority.

"We take issue with the assertion that KBR knowingly harmed troops and was responsible for an unsafe condition," spokeswoman Heather Browne said in a statement. "Further, the company in no way condones any action that would compromise the safety of those we serve."

Sodium dichromate, a reddish-orange dust, was strewn all over the ground and equipment at the plant, Blacke said. He told the panel he thought Houston-based KBR ignored the danger of the chemical so as not to slow down its work.

"They would have been able to complete the contract on time and under budget," he said. "They would have made money on the contract."

Nine workers have sued the company because of exposure to the toxic dust at Qarmat Ali.

Another worker, Danny Langford of Texas City, Texas, said the dust caked "on your hands, in your eyes, on your clothes, just everywhere."

Langford and other workers blamed the chemical for breathing difficulties, bloody noses and sore throats while in Iraq. Like Blacke, Langford said he has experienced chronic troubles from the contaminant.

Source: www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/headline/nation/5849937.html

[michelle]

This is a global question I ask: Just who the hell are unions siding with? As stated in one of the following articles, "Workers can only defend themselves if they break from the nationalist and pro-capitalist outlook of the CAW and the other unions and develop an international and socialist strategy in defence of jobs and living standards."......Michelle

France: How the unions broke an offensive of the working class
By Alex Lantier and Kumaran Ira
30 June 2008

In the two months since his April 24 national televised interview, French President Nicolas Sarkozy has announced or passed a wave of socially regressive measures in the face of mass popular hostility, compounded by anger over state inaction on rapid inflation of food and fuel prices. However, the last demonstration called by trade unions against these policies on June 17 found a relatively small response, and no further national demonstrations are currently planned.

The fall-off in the size of demonstrations cannot be ascribed to growing support for Sarkozy. In a June 24 BVA poll for the financial daily Les Echos, 63 percent of those polled disapproved of Sarkozy’s economic policy and 71 percent expressed no confidence in his ability to reduce inflation. Sarkozy’s approval ratings stand at 36 percent. Banque de France director Christian Noyer and European Central Bank director Jean-Claude Trichet have both called for wage increases to be held below food and fuel price increases, thus helping impoverish workers. The popular mood in France is increasingly bitter and angry.

As is now widely acknowledged by numerous commentators, the treachery of the union bureaucracy played the main role in breaking up and isolating workers’ opposition to government policies. In a coordinated struggle, the millions of rail, postal, education, industrial, port, restaurant, retail, fishing, trucking and ambulance workers who struck in recent months could easily have shut down the economy, directly challenging the existence of the government and its social programme. Such a struggle depends, however, on the existence of a revolutionary political leadership in the working class.

Sarkozy found no such opponent in the trade union bureaucracy, which sought to dismantle and demoralise workers’ opposition, all the while proclaiming its agreement and collaboration with the government.

In an April 18 Financial Times interview, CGT (Confédération générale du travail) union leader Jean-Christophe Le Duigou praised Sarkozy, saying, “He understands that we must give a place to social dialogue.... Everyone believes that things must change.” Sarkozy, who had written an April 18 Le Monde editorial admitting that all his reforms had been worked out in advance with the trade unions, praised them in a television interview April 24: “I would like to pay my respects to the trade unions.... One cannot govern a country without responsible trade union forces.”

At the time, the French bourgeoisie faced continuing demonstrations by high school students protesting job cuts and curricular reforms in education; undocumented immigrant workers in service, retail and construction demanding official papers; and strikes by machinery operators at France’s major commercial ports. In an unusual set of private-sector strikes, workers at Coca-Cola and retail outlets Carrefour, Virgin Megastore, and La Redoute struck against inflation and for higher wages, and Airbus workers struck against the selling of plants in France and Germany.

After Sarkozy’s TV address, in which he announced his determination to continue with his reforms, the unions felt compelled to organise a semblance of concerted opposition. However, they relied on tried-and-true tactics to divide the movement: calling one-day actions every few days on separate issues, dividing demonstrations between different union federations, all the while continuing to negotiate with state officials. The goal was to prevent the coming together of strikes that could both disrupt the economy and raise before the working class the possibility of a united struggle against the totality of Sarkozy’s economic programme.

On May Day, 200,000 workers marched in demonstrations around the country, though the Force Ouvrière and CFTC (French Confederation of Christian Workers) unions organised separate marches. The unions planned a joint May 15 demonstration by public service workers against job cuts in education and the public sector. When, on May 7, Labour Minister Xavier Bertrand confirmed plans to increase pension pay-in periods from 40 to 41 years, the unions did not call for other workers affected—including rail, airline, energy, telecom and postal workers—to join the May 15 demonstration, but rather called for a separate May 22 day of action.

On the May 15 demonstration, more than 300,000 people marched and 1 million workers struck; this was followed by the May 22 pension demonstration, where 700,000 marched nationwide.

The next day, the trade unions signed an agreement on “social dialogue” and employment conditions in the public service. By signing an agreement that public sector workers’ strikes were designed to prevent, the union effectively torpedoed the public sector workers’ mobilisation. A May 24 demonstration against education job cuts gathered only 7,000 people.

Amid gathering strikes by fishermen on May 26-27 over fuel prices, the unions decided not to call further demonstrations against education job cuts, citing the need to let students and teachers work on end-of-year exams. A joint statement by the education wings of the different French trade union confederations stated that they were putting off consideration of “a continuation of the movement until after the summer vacation.”

The June 10 mobilisation of civil servants and railway workers against job cuts, pension reforms and freight reform at the national railways took place amid strikes by workers at France’s strategic commercial ports against privatisation, and by fishermen, truck and ambulance drivers, and farmers against rising oil prices. However, the trade unions made no attempt to organise a broader strike of the transport sector against privatisation and rising fuel prices.

On June 11, the unions signed an accord on “16 points of convergence” with Education Minister Xavier Darcos, torpedoing the relaunch of the student movement after summer vacation that they had falsely suggested they were considering on May 27. On June 12 and 13, the French parliament passed labour market reform and deregulation laws, the former having been signed by the trade unions in January. These moves made it increasingly clear to workers that the unions were not seriously opposed to the government, which had no intention of giving in to isolated strikes.

The June 17 demonstration for pension rights and against the dismantling of the 35-hour workweek—which the unions had themselves agreed to in a “common position” with employers’ organisations in April!—gathered 500,000 workers nationwide. Participants at the demonstration interviewed by the WSWS questioned the motives of the union and the usefulness of the struggles they led. After the demonstration, CFDT (Confédération Française Démocratique du Travail) leader François Chérèque explained he wanted to “get back to dialogue” with the employers, while CGT leader Bernard Thibault incredibly proposed a further mobilisation, which he proposed to put off until after summer vacation, in October.

The discrediting of the unions is a source of significant concern in Sarkozy’s government, who worry that they risk losing their most effective method to break up working-class opposition. The daily Le Monde wrote on June 24: “[The Elysée presidential palace] is watching, as the president’s counselor for social affairs Raymound Soubie told us, to prevent ‘a weakening of the trade unions and the appearance of uncontrolled movements.’ ”

Soubie’s comment explains as well as any the role of the trade union bureaucracy—a straitjacket controlling the movements of the working class.

Source:
www.wsws.org/articles/2008/jun2008/fran-j30.shtml
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As GM layoffs mount, more nationalist poison from Canadian auto workers union
By Carl Bronski
27 June 2008

In a new blow to auto workers at the sprawling General Motors assembly complex in Oshawa, Ontario, GM announced this week that about 1,000 employees at the soon to be closed truck plant near Toronto will be temporarily laid off for up to eight weeks over the course of the next six months.

The announcement comes on the heels of a decision taken earlier this month by the company to permanently shutter the truck plant and let go 2,600 workers sometime in the latter half of 2009. The closure decision was taken by corporate executives despite supposed assurances given to Canadian Auto Workers (CAW) union that new hybrid product lines would be allocated to the plant in exchange for the massive concessions the union agreed to in the newly negotiated master contract agreement.

When GM cited a standard loophole clause in the deal that tied production to market conditions, the CAW leadership’s policy of trading concessions for “job security” was exposed as a fraud.

Historically the CAW pointed to certain cost advantages for the auto companies—including a favourable exchange rate with the US dollar and a government-paid health care benefits—to argue that layoffs be carried out in the US, Mexico and other countries, rather than Canada. The sharp decline of the dollar, the collapse of sales of gas-guzzling SUVs and pick-ups and the financial instability of the Big Three US auto makers have all undermined the nationalist policy of the CAW.

In order to provide an avenue for the angered membership to blow off steam and move the spotlight away from its own abysmal failings, the union organized several publicity stunts, including a protest in front of GM’s national headquarters building and a plea to the big business parties in the federal parliament to resurrect the principles contained in the former Canada-US Auto Pact, which required auto makers to produce one vehicle in Canada for each vehicle they sold there.

These undertakings were little more than cynical stunts. The right wing Tory government of Stephen Harper, supported in this matter by the Liberals, have no intention of altering trade policies that have benefitted their paymasters in the business world. In any event, the fact that the Auto Pact was struck down as illegal by the World Trade Organization in 2001 was argument enough for them to ignore the CAW appeal.

Meanwhile, at the protest in front of GM headquarters, GM’s critical operations were left entirely unscathed whilst the union quietly acquiesced to a cease and desist order from the local Superior Court. When a protest convoy of automobiles briefly blocked supplies from entering the truck plant, Chris Buckley, CAW Local 222 president, personally intervened to relieve the bottleneck. How could it be otherwise? Since the beginning of the dispute, the union has assured GM of their opposition to any strike action by the membership.

Even the union’s pending grievance in front of the Ontario Labour Board is little more than a fig leaf. Although GM may be required to address certain procedural violations stemming from their closure announcement, there is no chance that the property rights of the company will be undermined by the court. This much was admitted by CAW President Buzz Hargrove, who said, “We’re going to look at what our legal options are. Quite frankly, we’re not overly enthused by that. In the history of the courts or labour boards or arbitrators, we can’t find anywhere they’ve forced a company to invest or keep a plant open once they’ve made the decision to get out.”

All of the actions by the CAW have been aimed at preventing auto workers from drawing the necessary conclusions about the efficacy—or indeed, non-efficacy—of the union’s bankrupt nationalist perspective. If the real anger of auto workers in Oshawa and elsewhere across the province has thus far been contained by the union leadership, it has been as a direct result of the confusion and misdirection sown amongst the membership by the CAW bureaucracy and its supporters.

One needs only to peruse the pages of the monthly newsletters put out by the various auto workers locals to see the constant bombardment of national chauvinist ideology. Auto workers are told that they are engaged in a fratricidal struggle for jobs, wages and conditions against their class sisters and brothers across the globe. They are told that the only way to defend themselves is to work harder, accept concessions and sufficiently enrich auto company shareholders so that the layoff and closure axe will fall instead on workers in other plants in other countries. Of course, the workers in those other countries are told the same thing by their own unions. And the race to the bottom continues.

A recent column in The Oshaworker, the official organ of CAW Local 222, by long-time union functionary Ron Carlyle reveals the depth of these reactionary nostrums within the union bureaucracy.

In the May 2008 edition, Carlyle, the current Car Plant Area Chairperson at the Oshawa complex, writes: “On a recent vacation to the United States; I got upset seeing people driving non-domestic vehicles. I had several (let’s call them discussions) with so-called “proud Americans” who proudly display their American flag on the back of the imports they drive. For instance, I said to them that one of the recent darkest days in America was the tragic 9-11 disaster. They agreed. Then I asked if Afghanistan or Iraq opened dealerships in the US would they buy vehicles from them? They strongly replied negatively (good). I then asked them to look back in history and think of another dark day in America of Pearl Harbour, and why they now buy vehicles from Japan, after all it is the same people who 60 plus years ago tried to destroy you...”

If chauvinism is indeed the last refuge of a scoundrel, Carlyle is most surely at journey’s end. The statement, later reported approvingly in the minutes of a local union leadership meeting (albeit adding, the Korea based carmaker Kia into the Pearl Harbour mix), clearly shows how easily the arguments of the bureaucracy’s brave trade warriors dovetail with those of Stephen Harper and George W. Bush on broader “matters of state.”

But leaving aside Carlyle’s approving linkage of protectionist “Buy Canadian” or “Buy American” blandishments with imperialist military adventures, one has to ask, where has this staunch labour bureaucrat been for the past twenty years?

The globalization of the auto industry has ensured that there no longer is any such thing as an American car, a Canadian car—or a Japanese car, for that matter. Honda Accords are built by North American workers in Ohio and Ontario. The Toyota Corolla and the Pontiac Vibe are made in the same plant in Fremont, California—a joint venture with General Motors via the NUUMI agreements. And just to ensure wage benchmarking, similar models are made in Mexico just across the border in another NUUMI arrangement. Then there is the Nissan-GM Saturn plant in Tennessee. In Canada, General Motors and Suzuki operate a joint venture at the giant CAMI plant in Ingersoll, Ontario organized by the CAW. And of course, General Motors markets German-made Opels in Canada.

For decades the auto makers have utilized the globalized capitalist economy to whipsaw contracts, rationalize production and increase profits. Workers can only defend themselves if they break from the nationalist and pro-capitalist outlook of the CAW and the other unions and develop an international and socialist strategy in defence of jobs and living standards.

Source:
www.wsws.org/articles/2008/jun2008/caw-j27.shtml