Sun seeks scabs for strike plan
With less than two weeks to go before a contract between the Baltimore Sun and its largest union expires, management is mobilizing a replacement staff to put out a paper should employees strike — a move denounced by union organizers.
At the same time, Sun management points to its offer of $1,000 signing bonuses to union members to settle, as well as the hiring of a federal mediator for the talks, as good-faith signs that it wants to ratify a fair agreement and avoid a strike.
The Washington-Baltimore Newspaper Guild, which represents 650 Sun editorial, advertising and technical employees, said advertising, and sales replacements are “in the building,” being trained. And editorial sources at other Tribune Co. papers say reporters and photographers are being recruited. Replacements are being offered their own salary plus the salary of the staffer they replace, along with a daily per diem and room and board expenses, sources said.
Sun staffers have taken to wearing “I’m irreplaceable” buttons and the Guild has drafted a letter to Tribune Co. employees hoping to dissuade them from accepting an offer of work.
“Whatever the company’s managers have told you about your stay in Baltimore, we want you to know that you are ‘scabs,’ a not-so-nice word for ‘replacement workers’ who take advantage of labor unrest to make an extra buck,” the letter reads in part. (Baltimore Business Journal)

Coke worker fired for drinking Pepsi
A US truck driver who worked for the Coca-Cola Bottling Company has been fired after being spotted drinking a soda made by the rival Pepsi company, union officials said.
Rick Bronson, who worked for the world’s biggest soft drink firm for 12 years, was fired after someone reported him for supporting the enemy, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters said.
“Coke is really grasping at straws on this one,” said Jim Santangelo, principal officer of Teamsters’ branch of which Bronson is a member in El Monte, east of the California hub of Los Angeles.
“This is nothing more than an attempt to get rid of a pro-union employee. The Teamsters will fight every step of the way to get Rick’s job back,” he vowed.
The Teamsters claim that Coke really fired the worker because of his work three months ago in organizing Coke merchandising workers under the powerful union’s aegis.
The dismissal came after he was allegedly spotted in the back room of a store where he was making a delivery swigging on a Pepsi.
Bronson believes the person who reported him for publicly straying from his home brand had been hired by Coke to follow him and catch him off guard. (AFP)

Parents march to protect $5 day care
Hundreds of parents marched through downtown streets of Quebec on June 14 with one message for the newly elected Liberal government — hands off the $5-a-day day-care program.
Premier Jean Charest’s government has said it wants to change the province’s signature social program by allowing private day-care centres to provide the service and possibly charging high-income parents more.
The program costs Quebec taxpayers $1.6 billion a year and has waiting lists of up to three years.
But it has many parents and social groups supporting its universality and non-profit nature.
“The day cares constitute an essential service and must be protected for the social good,” Michele Asselin, member of a provincial women’s group, said in front of Charest’s downtown office after the march.
Some parents fear changing the universality of the program could lead to a two-tier system or make it inaccessable to middle-class parents.
“It’s egalitarian the way it is,” said Christine Boivin, 40, a day-care educator. “I fear we could end up with private day cares for high-income earners and other day cares for low-income children.”
A petition with more than 100,000 signatures calling for the maintenance of the universal program was presented in the provincial legislature on June 11. (CP)

Smithfield Foods target of labor rights campaign
The United Food & Commercial Workers International Union (UFCW), the nation’s largest food workers union, launched a labor rights campaign June 13 that targets pork processing giant Smithfield Foods. The UFCW says its “justice” campaign focuses on workers at a Smithfield hog-processing plant near Tar Heel, NC. The union is attempting to publicize a labor controversy at the plant, where the company was found guilty of violating various civil rights when workers tried to organize in 1997.
Union representatives accuse plant managers of organizing the beating and firing of workers in an effort to taint union votes and of creating a hostile work environment for blacks and Hispanics. The 1997 union drive sparked violent retaliation from Smithfield management, according to testimony from workers who said they were beaten and arrested for supporting a union. Last year, a federal jury ordered Smithfield and a former security chief to pay $755,000 in damages. The company has appealed the decision.
Retail food operators and consumers will be asked to send a message to Smithfield — a message demanding an end to management tactics that have brought a jury verdict finding the company in violation of the Ku Klux Klan Act, a decision from a federal administrative law judge finding systematic and pervasive labor law violations, and a Human Rights Watch report finding the company in violation of international human rights standards. (Raleigh News & Observer, Altanta Journal Constitution, UCFW, Smithfield Foods, Inc., Forbes)

Swiss right wing targets maternity benefits
Paid maternity leave for working mothers has moved a step closer to reality in Switzerland, the only country in western Europe without such benefits.
However, the right wing People’s Party is threatening to derail plans to grant mothers 14 weeks paid leave by putting the issue to a national vote.
The Swiss Senate on June 12 followed the House of Representatives in approving the law, which would give mothers access to 80 percent of their former salary.
It has taken four years for parliament to come up with a new legal framework for maternity benefits.
In 1999, a federal law was rejected in a nationwide vote, the third time in 15 years that the Swiss turned down paid maternity leave.
Although the concept of maternity benefits was enshrined in the constitution 60 years ago, it has until now been up to individual employers to choose whether to pay them. (Swissinfo)

600 strikes fight for pattern agreement in Australia
More than 600 manufacturing companies were hit by a 24-hour stop work on June 12. The action was initiated a week earlier by a shop-stewards meeting of the Victorian branch of the Australian Manufacturing Workers Union.
The AMWU is campaigning for very similar enterprise bargaining agreements across the manufacturing sector, as part of the pattern-bargaining-based Campaign 2003.
The meeting also decided on a further stoppage and rally on July 3, directed at companies that still hadn’t finalized the agreement.
“This is an attempt to force those companies that have been in negotiations for more than three months to take action and sign the agreement,” said Steve Dargavel, assistant state secretary of the AMWU.
The Australian Industry Group, one of the major employer peak bodies, has sought court orders against the unions, and against the workers at 40 different companies, claiming that the strikes are illegal because they are industry-wide bargaining.
The Coalition government has declared industry-wide bargaining illegal under the workplace relations act. Dargavel told Green Left Weekly that the union’s actions are legal, because they fit into the protected action that workers are still allowed in an enterprise bargaining negotiation period. (Green Left Weekly)

Europe’s aging population revolts at longer work, lower pensions
The hot summer of Europe’s discontent is being brought to the boil by the issue of state pensions as employees are ordered to work longer for less and to dig deeper into their pockets for the privilege of getting less back from the welfare fund.
The French prime minister, Jean-Pierre Raffarin, took his proposals for reforming the state pension system to parliament June 10 as a mass demonstration against them paralyzed Paris in the tenth day of industrial action since April. His fellow conservative, the Austrian chancellor Wolfgang Schüssel, faces bitter opposition in the parliament in Vienna to his pension reforms, a week after the biggest strike and protest actions the post-war republic has ever witnessed. In Germany, meanwhile, the center-left Schröder government is struggling to master a public finance crisis. Last week the federal statistics office published a sobering survey of demographic trends which warned Schröder, who is also tinkering with the state pension system, that his policies were failing to address the challenges posed by a shrinking and aging population.
In Austria, Karlheinz Nachtnebel, of the Austrian trade union federation, said: “The pension debate has become virulent all across Europe. We don’t want to cripple the country and call a general strike. But the European social model is at stake and it has to be defended.”
At issue is the sustainability of pay-as-you-go state pension systems in which those in work pay the pensions of the retired rather than, as many fondly imagine, putting a nest-egg away for their own retirement. (The Guardian)

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