—ON THE PICKET LINE—

Maggie Trowe, Editor

 

Bus drivers in Israel fight to raise pay, close wage gap

Some 800 drivers at the Egged-Taavura Ltd. bus company in Israel held strikes March 2 and 26, demanding higher pay and benefits and better work conditions.

“Workers are angry,” Assaf Bondy, south region coordinator for the Koach La Ovdim (Workers Power) trade union, said by phone March 30. “New hires make only 32.60 shekels an hour [$8.30]. Many drivers work 10 to 12 hours a day, to make ends meet.”

About 60 percent of the drivers are Jewish, including some Russian immigrants. Most of the others are Palestinian citizens of Israel. A small number are Palestinians from the West Bank.

Some of the bus routes take passengers between Israel and the West Bank. “Drivers on those routes face challenges called stones and Molotov cocktails,” Bondy said, referring to occasional attacks on buses by protesters opposed to the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory. The union is demanding “extra pay for the higher risk.”

Egged began as a cooperative in the 1930s. In the 1950s it began to hire other workers, paying them less than cooperative members. Egged — along with another bus cooperative in Tel Aviv — had a government-sanctioned monopoly on public bus transportation.

In 1999 the government started selling the right to operate competing bus lines to private companies. Egged-Taavura is a joint venture formed in 2004 as part of this process.

“The drivers were disappointed in the last contract,” Bondy said, so about a two and a half years ago they left the Histadrut, Israel’s largest trade union federation, and joined Koach La Ovdim. Long-time drivers make one-third more than recent hires. Workers are demanding a raise for lower paid workers that would narrow the gap.

Drivers had planned to let workers ride free on March 2, but when bosses caught wind of the plan they sent all the drivers home. “Drivers went on strike again March 26,” Bondy said, “because management took a U-turn during the negotiations, refusing to recognize agreements reached at previous meetings.”

— Seth Galinsky

Crown Holdings can workers strike in Ontario wins support

TORONTO — Eighteen months into their strike against Crown Holdings, a major producer of beer cans, the 120 members of United Steelworkers Local 9176 are still fighting for a contract.

Crown has been operating with management and strikebreakers.

The local has been organizing “Days of Action” publicizing the strike and winning solidarity by leafleting at targeted provincial beer stores. The strikers are asking workers to buy beer in bottles instead of cans.

At the beer store in a working-class neighborhood on Toronto’s east side March 28, a dozen workers, including five teachers, leafleted. Striker Steve McHugh, the main organizer of strike outreach, organized the action. Global TV news came by to do a story.

The response to the leafleting was positive and many workers made a point of showing the strike supporters the cases of bottled beer they had bought as they left the store.

Ontario Labour Minister Kevin Flynn appointed a mediator March 13.

The strike has received support from unionists in Canada, the U.S., Europe and Turkey. To express solidarity or contribute money to the strikers, go to the USW Local 9176 website: www.bottlesnotcans.ca.

— Tony Di Felice

Vietnam shoe workers strike beats back attack on social gains

After a week of strikes and protests, 80,000 workers at the Pou Yuen Vietnam shoe factory in Ho Chi Minh City have forced the government to withdraw planned changes in social insurance payments. The company makes shoes for Nike and Adidas.

After the government announced the plans, thousands stopped work March 27 in protest. Over the following seven days they marched inside and outside the plant, blocking traffic on Highway 1, one of the country’s two main national arteries.

Workers currently get a lump-sum payment whenever they leave a job, roughly 150 percent of a month’s wages for every year of service. The new law, which was to go into effect in 2016, would replace the lump-sum with a monthly pension at retirement. The retirement age is 60 for men and 55 for women.

“When we can’t work, we want to get our social insurance all at once, so we can build a house for the family,” striker Nguyen Van Thu told Bloomberg News March 31. “We have to pay for all kinds of insurance and we’re afraid we’ll lose it under the new law.” With a workweek of 60 hours, workers fear they won’t last the 20 years of service needed to qualify for the pension.

Many worry that the whole insurance system is insolvent and there will be no money left by the time they retire.

On March 31, the fourth day of the strike, the deputy labor minister met with the workers. The following day the government said it will propose to the National Assembly it amend the law to give workers a choice between taking the one-time payout or the monthly pension later.

Pou Yuen Vietnam is a subsidiary of the Taiwan-based Pou Chen Group, which employs more than 400,000 people in factories in China, Vietnam and Indonesia. In April last year 45,000 workers at its Yue Yuen factory in Dongguan in southern China conducted strikes and protests when they found out that the company had paid insufficient social welfare contributions. After 11 days of actions the Chinese government ordered the company to start paying the full installments immediately and to cover arrears for the previous four months.

There were close to 300 strikes in Vietnam in 2014, mostly directed against individual companies and centered on wage demands and working conditions. Strikes against government policies are rare.

Vietnam’s booming textile, garment, and shoe and leather sector accounts for 16 percent of the country’s gross domestic product. More than 3 million workers, 70 percent of them women, are employed at some 6,000 factories.

— Emma Johnson