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Global worker No1 2022

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Dear friends,&nbsp; 
 
This is to inform you that ICEM affiliate, the Korean Chemical and Textile Workers&rsquo; Federation (KCTF), together with their national centre, KCTU, have launched, on 1 April 2006, a boycott campaign against the products of GS Caltex (formerly LG Caltex) in Korea, in a protest against the company&rsquo;s labour practices. 
<img height="225" alt="" src="" width="300" />
In July 2004, the GS Caltex union went on strike against this oil company after a deadlock in negotiations. Talks broke down over such issues as the demand for a five-day, 40-hour work-week and the call for the non-discrimination of contract workers. Instead of bargaining with the workers, the company retaliated against the strikers, with the help of the Korean government, through excessive use of riot police, which brutally suppressed the strike. 
 
After the end of the 20-day strike, management continued its aggressive anti-worker behaviour by screening returning workers, harassing families and dismissing almost all union officials, 30 in number. In addition, eight union leaders were arrested for their roles in the strike, and sentenced to periods of two to three years in prison. A total of 650 other workers were disciplined with three-month suspensions from work. 
 
Until now, there has been no sign from the company that it wants to end its unfair labour practices or reinstate the dismissed union leaders. This led to the decision by the union to announce the boycott of LG-Caltex products inside Korea. GS Caltex Korea is 50% owned by Chevron and 50% by the Korean GS Holding.&nbsp;
We would like to ask you to support our Korean affiliate by sending <a href="/index.php?id=155&amp;doc=1752">a protest letter to the Korean government</a>. A model protest letter is attached for that purpose. 
The letter can be addressed to: 
President Roh Moo-hyun 
1 Sejong-no, Jongno-ku, 
Seoul 110-820 
Republic of Korea 
Fax: +82-2-770.03.44 
E-mail <a href="mailto:president@cwd.go.kr">president@cwd.go.kr</a> 
Please also send a copy to the Korean Ministry of Labour at <a href="mailto:chun-79@hanmail.net">chun-79@hanmail.net</a>. 
We also strongly encourage you to send a message of support to the KCTF. A <a href="/index.php?id=155&amp;doc=1751">sample letter of solidarity</a> is also attached. As with the protest letter to the government, please feel free to modify this letter, or to draft a similar one. Messages of support can be sent to: 
BAE, Kang-wook 
President, KCTF-KCTU 
Fax: + 82 2 2632 4755 
E-mail : <a href="mailto:kctfim@hanmail.net">kctfim@hanmail.net</a> 
Please send a copy of your support letter to: <a href="mailto:info@icem.org">info@icem.org</a>. 
 
Fraternally, 
 
Fred Higgs 
General Secretary 

 
For more background, please consult two earlier ICEM stories on the dispute.&nbsp;

<ul>
 <li><a href="/?id=78&amp;doc=278&amp;la=EN">LG Caltex Punishes Workers Who Struck in Korea</a> </li>
 <li><a href="/?id=77&amp;doc=1149&amp;la=EN">ICEM Blasts LG Group, ChevronTexaco for Stance in Korean Dispute</a> </li>
</ul>

KCTF-KCTU Seeks International Solidarity on Boycott of GS Caltex in Korea


ICEM calls for support for Korean trade union campaign against Caltex

UK Trade unionists of Amicus at International Paper Co.&rsquo;s Inverurie mill in Scotland will extend industrial actions into next week, giving notice to the US-based company that another four-hour strike will occur on Monday, 10 April, and then an eight-hour downing of tools on Thursday, 13 April. It will be the fifth time since 23 March that the 231-strong workforce will have struck, and the 13 April action will mark the first eight-hour strike. 
<img height="82" alt="" src="" width="160" />
The two sides met on 4 April. The union was heartened that company negotiators moved off a pay freeze for 2006, but the company attached unacceptable conditions to the sub-standard, two-year pay offer. It sought not to make the pay offer retroactive to 1 January, and the company also wants to make the first two days of January mandatory work days each year. 
 
Amicus union officials consulted with union members, and informed management today that their offer was unacceptable. &ldquo;We will keep the door open to further bargaining,&rdquo; said Amicus Asst. Branch Secretary Willie Wallace. &ldquo;We have suggested that ACAS get involved and we sincerely wish to resolve this dispute,&rdquo; he added. ACAS is the Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service of the UK, an independent but public-funded mediation service with a longstanding reputation. 
 
Amicus branch leaders and trade unionists at the Inverurie mill are perplexed by the company&rsquo;s bargaining posture. Absent in bargaining is good-faith and a fair exchange of ideas and proposals. Instead, managers come to talks with &ldquo;take-it-or-leave-it&rdquo; proposals, void of any desire or willingness for dialogue, according to Wallace. International Paper has presented three &ldquo;last, best and final offers&rdquo; in recent bargaining sessions, a fact not lost on Inverurie paperworkers as they&rsquo;ve united more through this dispute than ever before. 
 
This week&rsquo;s bargaining is a case in point. Amicus members know the company has never had a problem operating paper machines on 1 and 2 January. The voluntary system of working those days has never failed in the past. Considering also the company&rsquo;s demand that any wage increase for first quarter of 2006 is lost, this week&rsquo;s restructured &ldquo;last, best and final offer&rdquo; was easy to reject. 
 
&ldquo;The mood among members is hardening,&rdquo; said Amicus Asst. General Secretary Tony Burke. &ldquo;The company does not understand that they cannot keep rehashing previous offers which have found no favour amongst our members.&rdquo;

Eight-Hour Strike Next Week at International Paper’s Scottish Mill

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Senzeni Zokwana won re-election as president of South Africa&rsquo;s National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), while Frans Baleni was elected general secretary. Those and other elections were part of a spirited 12th National Congress of the NUM, held 24-27 May in Midrand, near Johannesburg. 
 
Over 1,000 delegates to the NUM&rsquo;s triennial Congress passed resolutions prioritising the issue of wage compensation, and convene a special summit to deal with the issue; to openly engage employers to reopen mines to enhance employment; and for leadership of the 300,000-member NUM to develop a discussion document on its important role inside COSATU related to labour&rsquo;s strained relationship as part of the African National Congress (ANC) Alliance. 
<img height="60" alt="" src="" width="100" />
The Congress also vowed to maintain NUM&rsquo;s bank as a workers&rsquo; asset, set in motion an aid and support plan for striking security guards in conjunction with the Transport &amp; Allied Workers&rsquo; Union, and commemorated the 1946 strike by the Black Mineworkers Union, with events leading up to the 60-year anniversary of the strike in the Witwatersran on 12 August of this year. 
The Congress closed by paying a rousing tribute to Gwede Mantashe, NUM&rsquo;s general secretary since 1998 who retired at this Congress. 
In opening the Congress, Zokwana, ICEM president, now in his third term as a NUM national office bearer, demanded of ANC leadership, including President Thabo Mbeki, that more anti-retroviral medicines be made available to workers in the fight against HIV/AIDS. &ldquo;This human culling must stop,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;South Africa has the resources to assist us and it must do so.&rdquo; 
 
Baleni, a miner who rose through NUM leadership ranks as a national organiser and then national education coordinator, has been the union&rsquo;s chief negotiator prior to his 27 May election. He headed the Production Pillar of the NUM. Zokwana joined NUM in 1983 as a shaft steward in a Free State gold mine, and rose through the ranks to regional chairman in 1993 and national vice president in 1994. 
 
Other national office bearers elected at the 12th Congress: Crosbi Moni, deputy president; Oupa Komane, deputy general secretary; Derick Elbrecht, treasurer general; Helen Diatile, chairperson of Education; Zwelitsha Tantsa, secretary of Education; Peter Bailey, chairperson of Health and Safety; and Eric Gcilitshana, secretary of Health and Safety.

NUM Elects Leaders at Energised South African Congress

<img height="40" alt="" src="" width="100" />
ICEM&rsquo;s Latin America/Caribbean Regional Coordinating Committee meeting in S&atilde;o Paulo, Brazil, on 18 and 19 May, discussed and took action on two pressing matters involving ICEM sectors in South America. 
 
The Committee resolved, considering the steps taken by the Bolivian people to institute a process of nationalisation of certain natural resources, to call on the governments and companies involved to be coherent in a wise and prudent response so that the rights of workers in these enterprises are not adversely affected. 
<img height="81" alt="" src="" width="120" />&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp; <img height="80" alt="" src="" width="120" />
Regarding the dispute between Argentina and Uruguay and the construction of two paper mills on the Uruguay side of the Uruguay River, the ICEM&rsquo;s Committee vowed to put pressure on both governments to immediately resolve the matter. The resolution stated that it was important that the opinions of trade unionists be considered in the combined US$1.7 billion projects by Mets&auml;-Botnia AB of Finland and Grupo Empresarial Ence of Spain. 
 
The resolution also said &ldquo;it was advisable not to ignore contributions made by those at the international level&rdquo; in this debate. &ldquo;In our double role as workers and trade unionists, we have to make sure, as we have done in the past, that control mechanisms exist which guarantee ecological and environmental sustainability for our people,&rdquo; ICEM&rsquo;s Latin America/Caribbean Committee declared. 
To read the resolution (in Spanish), <a href="/index.php?id=26&amp;doc=1814&amp;la=ES">click here</a>.

Nationalisation and Paper Mills: ICEM’s Latin Delegates Take Fresh Look at Two Regional Dilemmas

<img height="40" src="" width="100" alt="" />
North American&rsquo;s offshore oil and gas industry now has its second collective agreement in place after a Newfoundland-Labrador provincial arbitrator issued a 38-month labour contract between employers on the Hibernia platform and the Communications, Energy, Paperworkers (CEP) Union of Canada. Some 450 workers at Hibernia, whose managing company is US supermajor ExxonMobil, will receive yearly wage increases, plus backpay to 1 July 2004 totalling, on average, C$9,168. 
 
CEP won a guarantee that workplace certification of the platform and terms of the agreement apply to all successor companies or oil-service firms at Hibernia. The interest arbitration award lays out a three-week on, three-week off work rotation schedule. That includes 84 paid hours each workweek, divided into seven 12-hour days while on the platform. 
Hibernia workers were the first offshore oil workers anywhere in North America to organise a union, voting for the CEP in 2001. Workers at the Terra Nova platform, an oil rig also in the North Atlantic that is managed by Petro-Canada, voted for CEP representation in 2003 and the 120 workers there received a first collective agreement through an interest arbitration award issued on 30 September 2005. Legislation in several Canadian provinces provides for such a process in achieving first collective agreements, and also prohibits strikes or lockouts during that period.

Labour Agreement in Place at Hibernia’s Offshore Platform

<img height="40" alt="" src="" width="100" />
The 16-week-old lockout by Stora Enso at a paper mill in Canada will continue into the foreseeable future. The Finnish-Swedish company, which locked 600 members of Communications, Energy, Paperworkers (CEP) Union off their jobs on 26 January 2006, returned to the bargaining table on 8 May. 
 
But the session was short and discouraging. In a return-to-work agreement, Stora Enso demanded a 10% pay cut from workers in mid-April, and the union&rsquo;s counter-proposal last week was met with bitter rejection. The company then bypassed the union-management process by mailing to each worker its plea for acceptance, including the concessionary &ldquo;Recovery Plan&rdquo; that seeks to cut costs inside the Port Hawkesbury, Nova Scotia, mill. With a proposed wage freeze staring at them, workers would actually see an 18% cut in earnings if the proposal were to be accepted. 
 
Stora Enso has brokered C$65 million in subsidies from the province of Nova Scotia, covering seven years. But the aid package is contingent on a new collective agreement between the company and CEP Local 972, and CEP paperworkers in the maritime province will not slash their livelihoods to meet Stora&rsquo;s outrageous demands.

Stora Enso’s Demands Prolong Canadian Paper Mill Lockout

<img height="40" alt="" src="" width="100" />
In South Korea, trade union federations and legislators of the Democratic Labor Party have prevailed on the governing Uri Party not to table the controversial irregular workers&rsquo; bill in the National Assembly, at least not for now. In a series of daring political manoeuvres occurring in April, opposing forces to the pro-business legislation were joined by the major opposition party, Grand National Party, in successful efforts to sideline the proposed bills involving temporary workers. 
 
The legislation, if passed, would grant all temporary workers permanent status after two years. However, as it stands now, the bill woefully lacks the safeguards to prevent employers from discarding temporary workers through the two years. Trade unions and democratic advocates maintain that enactment of the law would mean more, not less, of Korea&rsquo;s workforce would be made up of temporary workers. 
 
In early April, the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions launched a five-day general strike against the Uri Party initiative.

South Korea’s Irregular Workers’ Bill Sidetracked

<img height="40" alt="" src="" width="100" />
Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero signed, on 9 May, into law a labour reform measure aimed at decreasing the abuse by employers of temporary work contracts. The new law, which becomes effective in July 2006, makes any employee who has held two or more temporary contracts totalling at least 24 months, within a 30-month period, a permanent employee with full social benefits. 
 
Companies, meanwhile, will receive incentives in the form of subsidies for transferring temporary workers to full-time status, as well as reductions in social security contributions for the same. 
Spain&rsquo;s two trade union federations &mdash; CCOO and UGT &mdash; and the employers&rsquo; organisation CEOE, along with the government, have been negotiating this positive reform for the past 14 months in hopes of an overall reduction in the use of temporary workers and to reduce the work-life stress that fixed-term contract labour brings.

New Temp Workers’ Law in Spain Has Positive Aspects

<img height="40" src="" width="100" alt="" />
ExxonMobil in France has been found guilty of trade union discrimination, and ordered to pay &euro;322,000 to four trade union representatives affiliated with French federation CGT. The ruling was issued on 5 May from a court of conciliation in Nanterre. 
 
Three of the four CGT delegates work at Esso&rsquo;s Port-J&eacute;r&ocirc;me refinery, while the fourth is employed at an Esso facility at Fos-sur-mer. The largest award &mdash; &euro;210,000 &mdash; went to a key union person who had been on the job for 34 years. 
 
CGT said the court&rsquo;s findings and awards stand as a call to young workers that it is allowed for militant trade union members &ldquo;not to think like the boss, but on the contrary be free to think differently, not having your professional career sanctioned&rdquo; because you do.

Guilty: ExxonMobil in France for Trade Union Discrimination

<img height="40" alt="" src="" width="100" />
Goodyear Thailand Ltd. has refused to reinstate 18 contract workers it sacked last year, despite an Industrial Court Commission (IRC) ruling that it must do so. Sixteen of the 18 reported for work at Goodyear&rsquo;s Bangkok tyre factory on 3 May, but management refused entry. 
 
Later, the workers received letters stating that the company disagrees with the IRC directive and intends to file papers in Thailand&rsquo;s central labour court to reverse the decision. &ldquo;The IRC&rsquo;s order is not final,&rdquo; the letters read, &ldquo;not until we exhaust the labour court mechanisms and the company cannot reinstate you at this time.&rdquo; 
<img height="100" alt="" src="" width="100" />
The contract workers, employed in the warehouse and rubber stock department, were fired in October 2005 for attempting to exert their legitimate collective bargaining rights. Several had been working for Goodyear for up to 10 years under one-year contracts. Goodyear had been deducting union dues from their pay checks for as long as four years. The IRC delivered its reinstatement order in mid-April. The ICEM will continue to press for permanent employment at Goodyear for the Thai rubber workers.

Goodyear Refuses to Reinstate Thai Contract Workers

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