English

Español

Français

Aerospace

Automotive

Base metals

Chemical, pharmaceutical and bio-science

Energy 

Glass, cement, ceramic and associated industries

ICT, electrical and electronics

Mechanical Engineering

Mining and DGOJP

Pulp and paper

Rubber

Shipbuilding and shipbreaking

Textile, garment, shoes, leather and textile services

Sectors

Action Plan 2021-2025

Action on textile and garment industry

Clean up shipbreaking

Ratify ILO C176

United for a just future - time to pay up!

Disinvest from Myanmar

Campaigns

Global Framework Agreements

Union building

White-collar workers

Health & safety

Industry 4.0

Women

Youth

LGBTQI+

Gender, equality, diversity and inclusion (GEDI)

Just Transition

Organizing with industriALL 

What we do

Affiliates

Statutes

Elected officials

Executive Committee

Geneva head office

South East Asia 

Eastern Europe, Central Asia and the Caucasus

Latin America and the Caribbean 

Middle East and North Africa

South Asia

Sub-Saharan Africa

Regional offices

About us

Global worker No1 2022

Global worker No2 2022

Publications

Resources

Logos of IndustriALL Global Union

Press

ICEM affiliate National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA) is in dispute with German rubber producer Continental Tyre over shift changes and restructuring at a Port Elizabeth factory. Up to 200 of the plant’s 1,400 workers could be retrenched under a company plan to cut weekend shift operations and manpower in various departments. Because management imposed the restructuring without consultation with NUMSA—a violation of the tyre industry agreement—over 300 workers staged spontaneous stop-work actions last week.

NUMSA Takes Issue with Continental Tyre's Restructuring

EPMU and Norwegian-based pulp and paper company Norske Skog signed an innovative agreement with Kewerau College for a maintenance training centre. The programme is the first of its kind in New Zealand and will provide training from apprenticeship up to and through advanced levels of skilled maintenance. “It’s a living example of a union and employer collaborating to fix a glaring gap in our skills and training,” stated EPMU National Secretary Andrew Little. Norske Skog operates the 600- worker Tasman paper mill, which produces newsprint and directory paper at Kawerau.

New Zealand's EPMU, Norske Skog Agree to Training Centre

Andriy Volynets, son of Ukrainian Miners’ Independent Trade Union Mikhail Volynets, was released from a hospital but doctors have not permitted him to return to work. Volynets was abducted and then brutally beaten 7 March in an act the ICEM believes to be political repression against his father, a member of the opposition coalition in the Rada, Ukraine’s Parliament.

Ukrainian Mining Leader’s Son Recovering from Brutal Beating

Organised labour is regrouping to meet new challenges. Union mergers have become an important source of strength in many countries. 
 
That process took a big step further in the USA this week with the creation of PACE, the 320,000-member Paper, Allied-Industrial, Chemical and Energy Workers Intl. Union. PACE results from a merger between two major US unions, the paperworkers' UPIU and the oil, chemical and atomic workers' OCAW. 
 
PACE immediately gave top priority to organising (i.e. actively recruiting new members) and to international trade union solidarity. Like both its forerunners, the new union is affiliated at the global level to the 20-million-strong International Federation of Chemical, Energy, Mine and General Workers' Unions (ICEM). 
 
First President of PACE is Boyd Young, who until now headed the UPIU. 
 
"We intend to set the pace for organising, a progressive vision and international solidarity," Young said. "The members of this great new union deserve to be and are prepared to be on the cutting edge as labour advances into a new century. We must fight for our future." 
 
The Executive Vice-President of PACE is Robert Wages, up to now President of the OCAW. He will take on key responsibilities in the union's organising programme and will continue to coordinate national oil bargaining. 
 
"When the merger discussions started with the UPIU, President Young and I committed to a basic premise," said Wages. "We were not interested in merging for the sake of being larger; we were interested in creating a new, more powerful and progressive union prepared to do the work our membership expects." 
 
Global trade unionism was highlighted during the merger Convention in a speech by the leader of locked-out Texan oilworkers. Crown Central Petroleum has kept unionised workers shut out of its Pasadena refinery since February 1996. Oil multinational Statoil has now told Crown that its contract to refine Statoil crude for the North American market will not be renewed unless Crown establishes normal relationships with the union. This pressure from Norwegian-based Statoil follows representations by the ICEM-affiliated Norwegian oilworkers' union NOPEF. During the PACE convention, the president of the Crown workers' union local paid tribute to this effective international solidarity. 
 
PACE has members in pulp, paper, oil, chemicals, pharmaceuticals, nuclear energy, cement, automobile parts, appliance manufacturing and a wide variety of other industries. 
 
The advent of the new union was warmly welcomed by ICEM General Secretary Vic Thorpe, who attended the merger Convention. "PACE represents a substantial consolidation of the ICEM's American membership," Thorpe commented. "We now have a powerful new affiliate with a strong commitment to global solidarity. This is good news for workers everywhere."

Pace-setting Union Merger Boosts US And Global Labour

Also in Nigeria, a day-long “warning strike” 22 June by NUPENG and PENGASSAN against Shell Petroleum Development Co. was conducted at worksites in Lagos, Port Harcourt and Warri. The action was taken over a document produced by Shell stating that the firm intends to cut between 30-40% of its 5,000-member workforce in Nigeria.

Warning Strike Launched at Shell in Nigeria

The framework accord reached in May between South African affiliate NUM and Harmony Gold Mining Ltd. was broken last week when the firm refused to budge on its initial stand of sacking 5,000 workers at six mine shafts. “Clearly, Harmony is not interested in saving jobs but wishes to wait out the situation by mothballing shafts until the price of gold improves,” said NUM Gen. Sec. Gwede Mantashe. “Their emphasis is more on cost-cutting and efficiency improvement, going against the framework we developed on saving jobs.” The union has declared a dispute with Harmony through a formal letter to the company and the Commission for Conciliation, Mediation and Arbitration.

Harmony Gold Breaches Agreement with NUM in South Africa

FCE CFDT also said recent financial figures of EDF suggests the company’s stated ill health in 2004 was exaggerated in order to prepare the public for partial privatisation of the state-run company. If finances are maintained for two further years at 2004 tax levels, the union contends, the company will be stable enough not to have to deliver any EDF stake into the hands of private capital.

False Signals Sent Over EdF’s Finances in 2004

A strike by key Finnish chemical, oil, gas and petrochemical workers is set to spread. 
 
Some 5,000 workers launched an indefinite strike yesterday afternoon at the call of their union Kemianliitto. The union has so far targeted 22 key companies in a national dispute over pay and working hours. If the conflict is not resolved by next Thursday 23 March, the union will call out a further 8,000 workers in the plastics and chemical products sectors. 
 
Sympathy action has also been pledged by Kemianliitto's sister union in Sweden, Industrifacket. The Swedish union will black any work transferred from Finland to Sweden during the dispute, but will also halt all regular trade in chemicals between Sweden and Finland. The main companies affected by the Swedish action will be Kemira (specialty chemicals), Aga (industrial gases) and Borealis (polyolefins and phenols). 
 
The Swedish union immediately promised the solidarity action after it had been alerted by the 20-million-strong International Federation of Chemical, Energy, Mine and General Workers' Unions (ICEM). Kemianliitto and Industrifacket are both ICEM affiliates. 
 
The scale of the Finnish and Swedish action means that other Finnish sectors will rapidly encounter serious supply problems. Among those worst affected would be the paper and steel industries. 
 
The key issues for the Finnish chemical workers are shorter working hours, especially in continuous shiftwork, and a reform of the wage structure. The chemical employers' final pay offer would have meant rises smaller than those obtained in other Finnish sectors. For continuous shift workers, the union wanted a 33.6 hour week, instead of the current 34.8 hours. The worktime patterns demanded by Kemianliitto are already operating in the other Nordic countries and in some Finnish industries, but the chemical employers were intransigent on this issue. 
 
The paper workers, too, have major current grievances. They want tighter restrictions on the use of subcontractors, shorter working hours and a significant pay increase. 
 
Protracted negotiations in the chemical sector - latterly in the presence of a government mediator - broke down after the employers rejected a union proposal for a three-year agreement. 
 
In a statement issued today, the Finnish union said it was "regrettable" that "the employer side did not take Kemianliitto's proposal seriously enough to avert the present dispute." 
 
"Our Finnish brothers and sisters are entirely justified in taking industrial action," said ICEM General Secretary Fred Higgs today. "We will ensure full international support for their campaign. We particularly applaud the rapid response of our Swedish colleagues. Unity is the only way to preserve and improve the workers' gains."

Finnish Chemical And Energy Strike To Spread

Global Companies Need Global Unions. So says a headline in the online edition of the Financial Times, over a guest article by Fred Higgs, General Secretary of the 20-million-strong International Federation of Chemical, Energy, Mine and General Workers' Unions (ICEM). 
 
Global agreements are in the companies' own best interests, writes Higgs. "If they are to convince a sceptical public of their good intentions, the big global corporations will have to put some content into their ethics. They will also have to go beyond self-proclaimed and self-evaluated codes of conduct." 
 
"All these agreements, both company-level and sectoral, will specify the unions' right to monitor implementation and to raise any breaches of the agreements with the global corporate management or the international industry federation," Higgs emphasises. "This is the crucial difference between a global agreement and a company's own code of conduct. 
 
"To workers and the public, a global agreement gives the assurance that standards are being systematically monitored and raised," he points out. "To corporations, it gives credibility." 
 
At the present stage of globalisation, the agreements will not be about pay, Higgs believes. Rather, they "will set a framework for global industrial relations in each company and each sector." They will also "ensure that corporations maintain the same high standards in all their operations as regards the protection of health, safety and the environment - a sphere in which regional variations are unjustifiable and unacceptable." 
 
The ICEM already has a company-level global agreement with oil multinational Statoil and is currently in talks on a number of others. At the sectoral level, good progress has been made on an agreement with the chemical companies' international body ICCA, under which the ICEM would help to ensure that the chemical industry's Responsible Care programme really does deliver the highest health, safety and environmental standards worldwide. 
 
"Our door is open," Fred Higgs concludes, "in the companies' interests as well as ours."

Global Companies Need Global Unions, Higgs Writes in FT

some 30,000 chemical workers in Eastern Germany and East Berlin are to receive a pay rise of 5.6 percent over two years, under an agreement signed by their union IG BCE on Saturday. Wages will go up by 2.8 percent on 1 July this year and a further 2.8 percent on 1 July 2001. 
 
Another agreement last week secured a two-stage 6.2 percent rise over two years for around 5,000 East German paper workers. 
 
West German workers in the same sectors will be receiving a two-stage 4.2 percent rise over roughly the same period under agreements signed earlier last month. 
 
When Germany reunified, wages in the East were much lower than in the West. Under separate bargaining arrangements, the gap is gradually being narrowed. 
 
The East German agreements extend the scope for part-time work by older employees, and guarantee them take-home pay equal to at least 85 percent of their last net full-time wage. There is also provision for expanding the number of apprenticeships available in the East German chemical and paper industries. The aim of both measures is to help reduce unemployment in Eastern Germany. 
 
At the global level, IG BCE is affiliated to the 20-million-strong International Federation of Chemical, Energy, Mine and General Workers' Unions (ICEM).

Pay Gains Achieved in East German Paper, Chemical Sectors

Archive