This column is devoted to reporting the resistance by working people to the employers' assault on their living standards, working conditions, and unions.

We invite you to contribute short items to this column as a way for other fighting workers around the world to read about and learn from these important struggles. Jot down a few lines about what is happening in your union, at your workplace, or other workplaces in your area, including interesting political discussions.

VANCOUVER, British Columbia - Fourteen thousand grocery workers from 130 supermarket stores across British Columbia set up picket lines on May 31 in response to a lockout by Safeway and the Overwaitea Food Group, which also owns Save-On-Foods stores.

"They're trying to split us up and weaken the union," said Michelle Fedesoff, a six-year cashier and member of United Food and Commercial Workers Union (UFCW) Local 1518, during her picket duty at a Safeway store in downtown Vancouver. The company's latest concession offer gives new hires Can$8 an hour, and puts a wage cap at Can$10 an hour (Can$1 = US$0.73). A wage freeze is proposed for all other workers. The bosses have proposed a Can$35,000 buyout to eliminate senior workers. Most of the workers are part-timers.

The company's latest proposal is a final-hour replacement of the first offer, which included a Can$6-an-hour cut in wages over the term of the agreement, with an immediate Can$2 pay cut, Fedesoff explained. A rollback in benefits and hours worked was tabled.

According to the May 31 UFCW bulletin, Update, the new offer proposes a two-tier wage scale and a restructuring of the current collective agreement, which will reduce the number of full-time positions and slash regularly-scheduled hours of work for part- time employees. In many stores, it currently takes 15 years to achieve full-time status; under the new plan, such status would be altogether eliminated.

In a vote held the second week of June workers overwhelmingly rejected the "final" offer by the employers, setting the stage for what is expected to be a long battle.

UFCW members had rejected the original offer by the company by a 96.3 percent vote. During that ballot they also gave the strike mandate to their union.

There is overwhelming support for the workers from passersby and customers. Shop steward Christine Taggart explained, "We're fighting for the future so that our customers' sons and daughters won't be second-class citizens when they get a job at Safeway."

Airport workers fight for contract in New Zealand
AUCKLAND, New Zealand - "We want, we want action!" has become the favorite chant of the 45 baggage and cargo handlers and cleaners employed by Ogden Aviation, who struck for eight days at the Auckland airport recently. Chanting pickets greeted airport workers and passengers entering the international terminal every day of the strike.

Set up as a nonunion operation several years ago, Ogden is now organized by the Engineers Union. The Ogden contract pays around NZ$1.50 per hour lower than the contracts for Ansett and Air New Zealand, the airport's other major employers. There are no penal rates on weekends and no minimum number of hours for part-time workers. A full-time loader takes home a little over NZ $300 a week, a part-time cleaner around NZ$180. (NZ$1= US$0.67).

Ogden responded to the threat of strike action by hiring replacement workers and training them under the noses of the existing workforce. It paid the scabs at time-and-a-half during the strike.

The company also suspended the delegate for the striking work- ers, Clinton Selwyn, on trumped-up charges of using threatening language. On returning to work, the part-time strikers found their hours had been chopped in half.

The workers have reached out to others in the labor movement by picketing travel agents downtown and calling on other airport workers to ban work on scab-loaded planes.

Ansett workers gave up the chance to earn sixteen hours at penal rates by respecting the plea of the striking Ogden workers.

Hotel strikers: "If we win other unions will win"
TORONTO - Over 100 dancing, chanting and singing hotel workers blocked trucks and handed out leaflets to hotel guests in the second day of their strike.

Six hundred members of Local 351 of the Textile Processors, Service Trades, Health Care Professionals and Technical Employees International Union walked out at midnight June 10.

More than 99 percent of the workers voted to strike in the face of demands by the Westin Harbour Castle bosses to gut their union contract.

In "job fairs" held in April and May the company recruited 200 scabs in preparation for the strike. They are now living in the hotel guarded by dozens of security guards. The workers have put up 24-hour picket lines.

"If we win other unions will win," shop steward José Nunes told the Militant. "If we lose all the other hotels will do the same thing."

Striker Viplay Singh said, "It's the beginning and we don't know where the end is." Last fall Ontario's Conservative Party government repealed a ban on the use of scabs by employers. Many workers see the Westin strike as a test of the union's strength under the new provincial labor law.

The strikers, many of them women, continued picketing as security guards video taped them.

Shop steward Hussein Darbani, a cook at the hotel for 11 years, described what the strikers are up against. It's a fight for "human rights," he said. "Last year they didn't hire any Blacks in the kitchen. They abuse the Chinese women and the women from the Philippines. They call them idiots if they forget their name tags or say `go back to your own country.' "

Darbani said a three-year contract expired May 31. The new contract, he said, wipes out all "past practice." The company wants to force the housekeepers who currently make a wage of Can$12.41 an hour do "piece work" for Can$6.50 for each room they clean.

If the company wins, cooks like Darbani will be forced to clean rooms or do other jobs on demand. The workers will face suspension and firing if they don't produce a doctor's note on the first day of an illness. They can be called in for a minimum of three hours work. They will have to pay for cleaning their own uniforms.

The bosses are offering a three-year contract with a wage freeze in the first year and raises of 1.5 percent in each of the following years.

The strike of the Westin Harbour Castle hotel workers follows a June 9 settlement by 700 members of Local 528 of the Service Employees International Union, race track mutual clerks who were locked out at the Ontario Jockey Club since February 26.

The locked out workers were forced to take a substantial wage cut and other concessions.

The Ontario Federation of Labour has been waging a campaign of one-day strikes and demonstrations against the austerity and antiunion drive of the provincial government.

The next protest strike is scheduled for June 24 in Peterborough, a city of 90,000 north of Toronto. Tens of thousands of workers have taken part in the three previous "Action Days."

Ned Demerson and Jacob Gavin in Vancouver; Malcolm McAllister, member of the Engineers Union in New Zealand; and John Steele, member of International Association of Machinists Local 2113 in Toronto, contributed to this column.  
 
 
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