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.
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 befriend with each other, 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.
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.
The following editorial appeared in the 26 September 2009 edition of Economic and Political Weekly, one of India’s leading journals. The article is particularly useful and its words of conclusion very important: “It is unwise to think that the weakening of one right will not have an adverse impact on the entire edifice of rights on which our political and civil life is based. A strong and capable trade union movement is crucial for sustaining a healthy democracy as well as for the strength of movements for justice and equity.”
The State of Our Unions The right to organise is a fundamental one; a weak trade union movement is incapable of defending this right.
According to the pink [financial] press and some spokespersons of Indian industry, the year 2009 has seen a revival of the trade union movement in India. The recent strike by pilots of Jet Airways foregrounded the issue of unionisation and the right to strike in public attention. Given the social background of the pilots and that they represent one of the most well-paid sections of India’s workforce, this also helped skew the discussion. There have been other prominent strike actions in recent times in important sectors of the economy. Coal miners threatened to strike work in January this year, port workers in March and bank employees actually went on a two-day strike in August. Other than that, well-known foreign multinationals like Hyundai in Chennai and Nestle in Pantnagar saw strikes which held up their production, while Mahindra and Mahindra and MRF workers also struck work. Industrial action was not limited to blue-collar workers, before the Jet pilots, there was the demonstrations by Jet Airways staff who had been summarily retrenched; Air India as well as Delhi and Mumbai airport employees went on hunger strikes and walkouts, MTNL officials and government doctors in Bihar and Maharashtra as well as officials of public sector oil companies have gone on strike.
The following statement was adopted by trade unions representing food workers from Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, Thailand, Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, Fiji, Pakistan, India and Sweden at the IUF-Asia/Pacific Food & Beverages Sector Meeting, held on 15 October 2009, in Bangkok, Thailand. A statement released by the IUF on 16 October 2009 is also available.
The shock of sky-rocketing food prices in 2007 and 2008, which led to food riots around the world and in our region, exposes the failure of the current global food system. More than one billion people are now in the grip of hunger and the food crisis confirms that many of us are, in fact, food insecure.
Although food prices have fallen as a result of the October 2008 global financial meltdown and the current deep recession, the ranks of the hungry have not diminished and the underlying system requires immediate change.
However, the present crisis offers an opportunity for a fresh approach to policy making.
In Sydney, Australia, on 1 October, Unions NSW (the peak body representing trade unions in the state of New South Wales) led a protest at the Australasian headquarters of Unilever as part of the Casual-Tea campaign for Litpon tea workers in Pakistan. Members from fraternal unions the Maritime Union of Australia (MUA) and the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union and IUF affiliates the Australian Manufacturing Workers Union (AWMU) and the Australian Workers Union (AWU) joined the protest.
On 16 September 2009 members of the IUF-affiliated New Zealand Dairy Workers Union (NZDWU) working for Open Country Cheese (OCC), part of New Zealand’s second-largest dairy exporter and owned by the Talley Group, took legal strike action over the company’s insistence in destroying job security and working conditions by planned casualisation of the workforce. In response to the attempts by the NZDWU to secure what are utterly fair and reasonable demands, OCC has gone into over-drive in an attempt to bully and discredit the union and its members. Not only has the company engaged in highly misleading statements to the press, such as claiming the union was seeking wage claims of 46%, but the company has now begun a six-week lock out of workers.
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. 
