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News :: Miscellaneous |
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Labor Hour Headlines 3/17/01 |
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by Peter Miller
Email: peterm (nospam) shout.net (unverified!) |
17 Mar 2001
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Headlines from the Illinois Labor Hour on WEFT 90.1 FM. |
Global Labor Condemns Executions in Colombia
Global labor organizations are forcefully condemning conditions that allowed two union leaders to be murdered in Colombia last Tuesday. Balmore Locarno and Jaime Orcasitas, who are the president and vice-president of the union at the mining firm Drummond, Limited, were dragged off a bus filled with workers and were then executed by a group of gunmen, some of whom were wearing military uniforms. The other miners on the bus were forced to witness the executions. The International Confederation of Free Trade Unions and the International Federation of Chemical, Energy, Mine and General Workers\' Unions each condemned the murders. The ICFTU, a global version of the AFL-CIO, suggested that it would ask the International Labor Organization to use its full authority to stop the killings of labor leaders in Colombia, where 130 labor leaders were murdered during the year 2000. ICEM, the miners\' union, suggested that paramilitary groups might murder trade unionists with the knowledge--or even assistance--of the Colombian military, which is receiving billions of dollars worth of military supplies from the United States of America. Jerry Jones, a vice president of the United Mine Workers of America, noted that the Drummond mining company recently moved many of its operations to Colombia, knowing about the country\'s political climate and egregious human rights violations. In other nations with lax human rights standards such as Nigeria, corporations have teamed up directly with the military to kill labor, environmental, and human rights activists.
http://www.icftu.org/
http://www.icem.org/
Chinese Prime Minister Apologizes for School Explosion
Under-funded schools led to an explosion on March 6, at a school in China, killing sixty people--mostly school children. The press quickly learned what community members knew, that the children weren\'t attending classes at the school; instead, they were assembling fireworks which would be sold to make up for shortfalls in school funding. Within days, the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions had sent a letter to Chinese President Jiang Zemin, urging China to end child and forced labor practices. ICFTU General Secretary Bill Jordan said that \"the events in Fanglin represent a grave violation of the rights of children under Conventions 138 and 182 of the International Labour Organisation, as well as several United Nations human rights instruments and ILO Convention 29 on Forced Labour.\" The Chinese government initially denied that children were making fireworks, but public outrage, fueled by fact that another firework explosion in a Chinese school a year ago had killed 35 people--including 17 children--led to Chinese Prime Minister Zhu Rongji making a national apology for the explosion. The prime minister also stated that national funding of schools would be increased, and that the government would stop any situations where children were found working in dangerous or life-threatening conditions.
Congress Makes Bankruptcies More Difficult
On Thursday, the U.S. Senate followed the House and passed a bill that will make it harder for people to erase their debts in bankruptcy courts. The senate voted 83-15 in favor of a bill that was vigorously opposed by organized labor. Thirty six Democrats voted in favor of the labor-opposed bill. Banking, credit card, and retail credit industries paid for passage of the bill through millions of dollars in campaign contributions over the past three years. Some say that the legislation turns the federal government into a bill collector for those industries, a complete reversal from the role the government used to play, as a protector of indebted people, particularly those who lose their jobs. Personal bankruptcies in the United States reached a record 1.4 million in 1998, up more than 300 percent since 1980. The National Center on Women and Aging notes that in 1968, revolving consumer credit was $2 billion; by mid-2000 that number had exploded to $630 billion. The individual savings rate in the U.S. has declined from 6 percent in 1980 to negative 0.9 percent in December, 2000.
Court Forces United Mechanics to Keep Aircraft Flying
On Wednesday last week, a federal appeals court issued an order forcing mechanics at United Airlines to reduce the number of maintenance problems they find with United aircraft. The ruling is intended to reduce the number of flight delays, which airline executives and the court agree are being caused by mechanics who are attempting to negotiate a contract with United. According to the Associated Press, the three-judge panel found that the International Association of Machinists lied when it claimed that it did not know about or coordinate the increase in maintenance delays, which rose from 0.8 percent of flights to 1.5 percent of flights during the first three weeks of February. The judges wrote that under the National Railway Labor Act, a union must actively work to prevent a strike or a work slowdown.
Flight Attendants Vote on Strike
Also at United, union flight attendants are voting on whether to strike. The union said on Thursday that it mailed strike ballots to its 25,000 members. The ballots, which will be counted on April 2 in Washington, DC, will determine how strongly the fight attendants feel about United\'s proposed merger with US Airways. The flight attendants have successfully used a strategy called \"Chaos\" to win concessions from airlines. In Chaos, flight attendants stage random, short walkouts on a small number of flights across the country, thus delaying the flights. Since air travelers don\'t know which flights will be targeted, they choose to fly on different airlines until the action is over. United is threatening to use the courts in this case also to stop workers from taking action.
Contract Negotiations for Hollywood Writers Break Off
Hollywood film writers have called a meeting to gauge support for a job action as contract negotiations between Hollywood film producers and the Writers Guild of America broke off last week. The contract for the guild\'s 11,500 members expires on May 1, and union leaders believe that the writers are ready for action. The writer\'s guild believes that vertical integration in the TV and movie industries--which have included restructurings like the biggest corporate merger of all time, between AOL and Time-Warner--have deprived writers of their fair share of revenues from videocassettes, cable TV, and foreign markets. The guild says that it made economic concessions in the past to help the videocassette and cable TV markets develop, and that it\'s time to reclaim some of those concessions. They point to the fact that manufacturing costs for videocassettes have dropped from $14 to $3 over the past decade, but writers\' share of the revenues has remained constant, at 4 cents per video. Difficult negotiations with writers are occurring amid challenging times for actors, as well. The actors\' union, the American Federation of Radio and Television Arts, staged a successful six-month strike over production of commercials last year, and their prime-time television actors\' contract expires on June 30. AFTRA hopes to settle this contract without a strike.
http://www.sag.org/
http://www.aftra.org/
Numbers:
And we have a few numbers to finish the week. First, unsuccessful management of its cell phone business led Motorola to announce that it will fire another seven thousand employees. It wasn\'t immediately clear whether workers at the Champaign facility will be affected.
In another major retrenchment, Compaq computer said it will fire five thousand people, or seven percent of its workforce. The Houston-based company is still profitable, but it had lower than expected earnings for the first quarter of the year.
Stock markets capped a major loser of a week with the Dow Jones Industrial Average closing at 9823, nearly two thousand points below its all-time high. The index lost 7.7 percent of its value for the week, and the high-tech NASDAQ composite lost 7.9 percent of its value, taking it to its lowest value since 1998.
On the plus side, the AFL-CIO reports that over a thousand city and health care workers in Savannah, Georgia joined the Service Employees International Union, in a campaign that was supported by the AFL-CIO Trades and Labor Assembly and the Atlanta Labor Council.
Seven hundred workers at cell phone company Cingular joined the Communications Workers of America through a card-check election. The workers in Michigan, Ohio, and Wisconsin used the card-check provision that the CWA won through a strike last year.
And, finally, 200 school bus and van drivers at Laidlaw Transit in Paramus, New Jersey, voted to join the Transport Workers Union on March 2. The Bergen County Central Trades and Labor Council, as well as activists from other unions, aided the winning campaign.
http://www.aflcio.org/publ/workin.htm
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