“They want to bust the union,” stated Andrea Levito, a nurse at the hospital complex for eight years. Prior to expiration of their contract at the end of June, nurses were being forced to train their replacements. In addition, right before the strike started hospital authorities sent all workers a letter asking them to resign from the union, noted Levito. However, Levito said, “99 percent of the nurses are out here. The hospital expected many more to cross.”

The workers are represented by United Steelworkers Local 4-200, a union that first won in May 2005 a charter at the hospital complex, one of the largest in the state. The first day of the walkout some 500 nurses were on the picket lines. “All the patients we had said they support us,” said striker Andrew Teller. “This is not a wage issue, this is about health care.”

—Brian Williams  
 
San Francisco: janitors picket
over workload speedup
Janitors and supporters picketed in downtown San Francisco August 8 next to a giant rat representing American Building Maintenance and other property managers who are intensifying the workload of workers who clean office buildings. The workers, who are members of Local 87 of the Service Employees International Union, are demanding that the union have the right, guaranteed in the contract, to verify vacancies in office buildings. Claims of vacancies is being used by the companies to lay off workers and to increase the workload.

—Betsey Stone  
 
Chile: copper miners vote
to end 25-day strike
More than 2,000 copper miners on strike in Chile since August 7 voted August 31 to accept a new 40-month contract with a 5 percent wage raise and a $17,000 bonus. The unionists had shut down production at BHP Billiton’s Escondida mine, the world’s biggest copper mine, which accounts for 8.5 percent of copper mined worldwide. Members of Escondida Workers Union No. 1, which represents 94 percent of the mine’s employees, were demanding a 10 percent pay raise. They currently make about $565 a month.

—Brian Williams  
 
N. Carolina Smithfield workers
rally for union in Virginia
RICHMOND, Virginia—Nearly 400 supporters of the United Food and Commercial Workers union-organizing campaign at the giant Smithfield pork processing plant in Tar Heel, North Carolina, marched and rallied here August 30 outside the company’s annual shareholders meeting. Unionists from the surrounding region as well as religious and civil rights leaders and supporters of immigrant rights joined the Tar Heel workers in support of their fight.

“Some dignity, respect, safety issues, and better pay” were some of the reasons why a union was needed, former Smithfield worker Edward Morrison told the crowd. Morrison, like many workers at the Tar Heel plant, was fired after being injured on the job. The National Labor Relations Board and U.S. Court of Appeals found that the company illegally assaulted, intimidated, fired, harassed, and pitted Black and Latino workers against each other as they tried to form a union in the 1990s.

—Janice Lynn  
 
 
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