Vol. 71/No. 39      October 22, 2007

Fresh Direct is an online grocery delivery company. About 900 people work at its Long Island City warehouse. Five hundred truck drivers and delivery workers there won a union election in November 2006. They are represented by the United Food and Commercial Workers Local 348. Teamsters Local 805 is conducting an organizing drive among warehouse workers, who have pointed to wages just above $7 an hour on average, high health-care premiums, and forced overtime.

“I had complained about the long shifts and the lack of security, but it was when I came out in support of [a union] that they decided to terminate me,” Gomez told the New York Daily News. “They made us work 12 and 14 hours a day, then…when some of us refused we were suspended for three days without pay.”

—Ben O’Shaughnessy

New Zealand watersiders
strike for wages, job safety
AUCKLAND, New Zealand—Waterside (longshore) workers picketed the Ports of Auckland’s container terminals during a 48-hour strike begun October 2. The Maritime Union members are seeking a pay raise of up to 4.9 percent, backdated to when their contract expired on Nov. 30, 2006.

“It’s taken us 15-20 years to get the union to where we are today,” said Gordan Kopu, a watersider for 31 years. He pointed to the younger unionists who had never been on a picket line before. “We’re stronger because we work well together, play well together, and now we’re fighting together.”

Picketers said that the number of containers they handle keeps increasing. The company wants to link extra payments to productivity. Another watersider, Paul, said such schemes undermine job safety. “I’ve asked the men, ‘Who wants to volunteer to be the first to die?’ Ours is a very dangerous industry. We have to be the ones to set the standards,” he said.

—Janet Roth  
 
 
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