—ON THE PICKET LINE—

Maggie Trowe, Editor

 

Montreal city workers strike to defend public services, jobs

MONTREAL — More than 8,000 city “white-collar” workers here are waging a month of rotating strikes culminating in a one-day general strike March 1 against the city administration’s plans to privatize public services and contract out their jobs. The workers, members of Canadian Union of Public Employees Local 429, have been without a contract for four years.

At a Jan. 26 picket line passersby honked as 40 strikers brandished signs that read, “Stop dismantling public services” and “I am the city.”

“Subcontracting our jobs is the major issue,” Local 429 President Alain Fugère told the Militant on the picket line. The city has been replacing only one of two vacancies, which will lead to the loss of 2,200 jobs by 2018, and aims to reduce wages by 12 percent.

The administration of Mayor Denis Coderre “is waging total war against the white-collar workers,” a Jan. 5 union statement said.

— Annette Kouri

New Zealand meat workers broaden fight to defend union

AUCKLAND, New Zealand — Meat Workers Union members remain locked in a battle with food giant AFFCO. The company, owned by the wealthy Talley family, employs some 4,000 workers, 1,000 of them union members, at eight AFFCO meat plants. It owns fish, vegetable and dairy processing factories as well.

The dispute began when the company insisted workers returning from seasonal layoff last year sign “Individual Employment Agreements” instead of renegotiating the union contract, which expired in 2013. At the Wairoa plant, more than 200 workers refused to sign and were locked out Sept. 9.

When the Employment Court ruled in November that the company’s action was illegal, workers at Wairoa hoped to go back to their jobs and negotiate a new contract.

Instead, bosses insisted they return without seniority to a special night shift. “What they offered us was a slap in the face,” shop steward Peter Amato told the Militant Jan. 25. “They’re acting like they won the court case.”

Wairoa workers rejected these demands and remain locked out.

Sixteen of them came here Jan. 25 to back a court case filed by the union demanding implementation of seniority.

“This is about being union,” said Tina Edwards, an offal worker. “They want to put us all on night shift to keep us away from the IEAs.”

Workers at the Rangiuru plant picketed Dec. 21 after three workers were stood down (refused entry) for wearing union T-shirts to work.

Unionists there, like most AFFCO workers, signed the Individual Employment Agreements last June and went back to work.

“We needed to get some income and wanted to keep the union alive in the plant,” butcher Bertie Ratu, Rangiuru Meat Workers Union shed secretary, said by phone Jan. 29. The company gave them no choice of shift, cut staff and ignored seniority.

“They put senior butchers on lower-paid jobs and replaced them with IEA workers with no experience,” Ratu said. “If the IEAs didn’t do it they were gone.” Ratu and shop steward Charmaine Takai were sacked for talking to workers about this before the shift started.

Workers face harassment every day, Ratu said. A lot of Individual Employment Agreements workers “can see how the company is abusing them” and have joined the union.

Locked-out Wairoa workers remain determined. They protest regularly on the bridge in the town. Unionists from the nearby Watties food processing plant donated canned food, and the local Maori tribe, Ngati Kahungunu, to which many of the workers belong, helped cover travel expenses to the court hearing here.

Donations to the locked-out workers can be made at: http://www.nzmwu.org.nz/index.html.

— Felicity Coggan