Support the struggle for trade union rights at Nestlé Waters in Russia, send a protest message.
Police arresting peaceful protestors at the PC Hotel Workers Union solidarity camp. Source: Ummat (Urdu), 2 March 2010.
8 years of intimidation, harassment, false imprisonment and violence directed at trade unionists in the Karachi Pearl Continental (PC) Hotel has not diminished the willingness of the members and officers of the union to continue the struggle for their rights.
In the latest incident of anti-union discrimination at the now infamous hotel, four leaders of the local union, Muhammad Nasir (President), Shah Nawaz (vice president), Ubaid ur Rehman (vice chairman) and Muhammad Ashfaq (vice propaganda secretary), were all issued with termination notices by the management on 24 February. These firings are without grounds and are purely directed at these workers as leaders of the local union (part of the IUF-affiliated Pakistan Hotels, Restaurants, Clubs, Tourism, Catering and Allied Workers’ Federation).
Nowera Nuddy Workers Action Committee meeting with IUF staff, 16 February 2010.
Workers at the Tata Tea controlled Nowera Nuddy plantation in West Bengal in India have been threatened again with collective punishment and starvation, this time directly by the general manager of the garden, Ipsit Gohain. Tata Tea, part of the transnational Tata conglomerate, are owners of the world’s second largest tea brand, Tetley, and control the Nowera Nuddy garden through ownership of Amalgamated Plantations.
The entire workforce at the garden were twice locked out and endured a total of almost four months without wages and rations in 2009. This was company’s response to a workers’ protest following the gross mistreatment of pregnant tea worker Arti Oraon, who was denied maternity leave and forced to work while 8 months pregnant.
The following article was published on 7 February 2010 in the Korea Times. It is posted here for the interest of readers and describes a long-running dispute at the Seoul Renaissance Hotel with members of the IUF-affiliated Korean Federation of Service Workers’ Unions (KFSU). The story provides significant detail to the way in which the Seoul Renaissance invented a scheme to outsource its cleaning operations, which was little more than an attack on senior workers. As the article notes, the hotel “established a subcontractor, headed by one of its former executives, and transferred its workers to the new agency’s payroll….the transferred maids saw their income slashed by one-third and welfare benefits removed.” The IUF and the KFSU continue to campaign for the reinstatement of the workers.
Court Orders Renaissance to Reinstate 8 Fired Maids; Ruling Set to Affect Intercontinental Hotel Case
By Park Si-soo
Maids are pivotal to hotel operations. But with the hotel industry not being what it once was, their job security is unstable. Hotels are trying to hire them as non-regular staff members, making it easy to fire them and reduce their benefits.
For that reason, the Renaissance Seoul and Grand Intercontinental hotels in southern Seoul have been in legal disputes for years, while the Lotte and Grand Hilton hotels in northern Seoul resolved such disputes before they went to court.
Last Friday, Lee Ok-soon, a former maid at the Renaissance, had her best day in years following a court ruling ordering the hotel to reinstate her and seven other women and recognize them as its fulltime employees.
Following an IUF international campaign in November and December of 2009, the closed Nowera Nuddy plantation in West Bengal India, owned by a company controlled by Tata Tea (owners of the Tetley brand), was reopened. The workers on the plantation had endured two closures since August 2009, which meant they were subjected to a period of four months with no denied wages and rations.
The workers “crime” had been to protest the abusive treatment of an 8 month pregnant woman who, denied maternity leave and forced to work in the fields, had collapsed. The treatment of this worker was part of a more generalised history of mistreatment of workers by the garden management. The video below was made during the closure period and details one worker’s experience of ill treatment and poor conditions.
Even though the garden has reopened, many problems remain; please send a protest message to Tata Tea.
Paul Cachia, Berri Juice worker and AMWU delegate member, during the campaign to win a new collective agreement (November 2009).
On 13 January 2010, the IUF-affiliated Australian Manufacturing Workers Union (AMWU), following endorsement from union members at Berri Juices in Sydney, signed a new collective agreement which secured conditions and brought long delayed wage rises.
For more than two years workers at Berri Juices, owned by National Foods, a subsidiary of the transnational food company Kirin, were denied any wage rises. National Foods insisted on changes to employment conditions which if implemented would have resulted in, among other things, significant losses of income from overtime work. During this period, which began when the last collective agreement at Berri Juices expired in February 2008, workers in Australia, like workers everywhere in the world, were confronted with steeply rising prices for basic goods.
In order to win the new agreement union members had to begin industrial actions at the factory. This was highly unusual as workers at Berri Juices had never been on strike in the factory’s entire history. Support for the union and the unity amongst workers was extremely high. In late 2009 when a vote for industrial action was taken, 98% of workers voted to strike.
Participants at the IUF Thailand national workshop for poultry workers, Bangkok, 5-6 December 2009.
The Network for Poultry Workers’ Rights and IUF Thailand jointly organized a workshop titled ‘Occupational Health and Safety (OHS) and Avian Flu’ on 5-6 December 2009 in Bangkok.
At the workshop, participants from different poultry processing plants socialised, learned about H5N1 (avian influenza), personal protective equipment (PPE) for disease and injury prevention and workplace occupational health and safety committees (which according to Thai law it must have elected worker representatives).
While consumer prices have been skyrocketing, workers at the Berri Juice factory on the outskirts of Sydney, Australia, saw their last wage rise in March 2007. This despite the fact that Berri’s operations in the same period have grown. The workers, members of the IUF-affiliated Australian Manufacturing Workers’ Union (AMWU), have been forced to take industrial action for the first time in 24 years due to the intransigence of the management in stalling negotiations on a new collective agreement. Berri is part of National Foods, which is owned by the Japanese multinational food company Kirin. At all the other Berri facilities in Australia, collective agreements have been concluded and wage rises have occurred.
A Japanese language version of this video is available on the IUF Japan website.
Tata, the transnational Indian conglomerate whose Tetley Group makes the world famous Tetley teas, has taken 6,500 people hostage through hunger. The hostages are nearly 1,000 tea plantation workers and their families on the Nowera Nuddy Tea Estate in West Bengal, India. Permanently living on the edge of hunger, the workers and their dependents are being pushed to the edge of starvation through an extended lock out which has deprived them of wages for all but two days since the beginning of August. The goal of this collective punishment is to starve the workers into renouncing their elementary human rights, including the right to protest extreme abuse and exploitation.
The IUF-affiliated New Zealand Dairy Workers Union (NZDWU) reached a settlement with the Talley’s Group owned Open Country Cheese (OCC) on 23 October 2009, following a bitter dispute where the employer refused to negotiate and locked-out workers. The IUF launched an international email protest campaign as part of the solidarity actions for the NZDWU members. The following information was provided by the NZDWU.
After 37 Days (an 8-day strike followed by a 29-day lockout) a settlement was reached at midnight on Wednesday 21 October, with ratification by Open Country Cheese workers late in the afternoon of Thursday 22 October. A final ratification was completed with the employer on Friday 23 October. Part of the settlement includes a union collective agreement. The NZDWU has expressed thanks to all who supported the OCC workers via messages, financial support and food.
