Clashes in Colombia during general strike

Bogota, Colombia, Aug. 7 — A national 24-hour strike Thursday to protest Colombia’s unpopular austerity measures and record unemployment saw 700,000 workers walk off their jobs, street battles with police, and a heavy presence of riot police and tanks in Colombia’s capital of Bogota.

Police confronted workers in four cities around the country, firing water cannon and tear gas. One worker in the southwestern city of Cali suffered a bullet wound, labor leaders said.

Oil workers, teachers, medical staff, telecommunications workers and government administrative workers were among those backing the strike.

It was the sixth strike against President Andres Pastrana’s deeply unpopular economic policies, blamed by critics for causing the highest unemployment rate in Latin America.

The strike also represented the first challenge for new Finance Minister Juan Manuel Santos, who has pledged a 2001 budget of “sweat and tears,” including 5,000 public-sector job cuts and wage increases below the inflation rate.

There were no reports that strikers had disrupted key economic sectors in the war-torn nation, nor that warring Marxist rebel factions had timed attacks to coincide with the strike, which militant Communist Party union chiefs had organized. Interior Minister Humberto de la Calle downplayed the strike’s impact, saying daily activity was “close to what is normal.”

Most public schools were closed for the day but production in Colombia’s oil fields and refineries was reported to be normal, as were telephone services.

Preparing for the worst, however, security forces were out in force in Bogota, utilizing tanks and riot police to guard key routes.

In Colombia’s central coffee-growing region, Indian and peasant protesters blocked a highway, and Marxist rebels bombed a high-voltage power pylon in the northwestern industrial hub of Medellin, a police spokesman said.

Wilson Borja, leader of the main public-sector union FENALTRASE said union leaders were sending a message to President Pastrana that they were not ready to let workers suffer the worst of Colombia’s economic crisis.

Indefinite strike threatened

“The government has been warned (with this strike),” Borja said. “What’s coming now is an indefinite, nationwide state workers’ strike.”

Next week union leaders are likely to set a date for an indefinite strike, Borja said. “We will not allow them to fire any more workers,” he declared.

Colombia’s traditionally buoyant economy shrank 4.5 percent in 1999 – the worst year since records began in 1905.

The economy grew in the first quarter this year thanks partly to sweeping public spending cuts imposed as a result of a loan deal with the Washington-based International Monetary Fund (IMF). But urban unemployment was 20.4 percent, the highest in the hemisphere.

Tanks patrolling street

In Bogota, the impact of Thursday’s strike was most visible in working-class neighborhoods in the south. In the southern Soacha neighborhood, four tanks patrolled the main highway — a key entry point to the capital from the nearby mountain region of Sumapaz, a Marxist rebel stronghold.

Public transportation ground to a halt, forcing citizens to pile aboard pickup trucks, cycle or walk to work.

Some 15,000 workers marched through downtown Bogota and massed in the central Plaza Bolivar square outside Congress waving banners and chanting anti-government slogans.

The strike is the first since the Soviet-inspired Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) guerrilla group launched its clandestine political movement, the Bolivarian Movement For a New Colombia.

The movement, which military top brass has described as a “party for war,” is designed to forge closer ties between the armed revolutionary “vanguard” and civilian mass organizations such as unions, student groups and neighborhood committees.

There was no indication that the FARC, Latin America’s largest surviving rebel army, was helping coordinate Thursday’s protest. Since the US Congress approved a record $1.3 billion package of mostly military aid to help Colombia fight drugs and guerrillas, the FARC repeatedly has attacked police outposts around the country.

Source: < USAS: www.usasnet.org

LAPD attacks organized labor at Democratic convention

Los Angeles, California, Aug. 15— Last night, August 14, at 8:30 p.m., the Los Angeles Police Department used clubs, horses, rubber bullets, and chemical weapons to attack up to a thousand union members as they attempted to peacefully disperse from the Staples Center rally site.

The D2KLA rally was cosponsored by a wide range of labor unions and was in fact an officially sponsored labor event. Some of the unions endorsing the event included the AFL-CIO San Francisco Labor Council, International Longshore & Warehouse Union, California Nurses Association, Film & Television Action Committee (representing members of IATSE, SAG, AFTRA, Teamsters, WGA, DGA), Laborers Local 724, AFSCME Local 1108, and P.A.C.E. Local 8-675. The unprovoked attack on labor by the LAPD was unprecedented in recent history and was the bloodiest labor conflict in Los Angeles since the 1940’s.

Organized labor has sponsored a series of events for the week of the Democratic convention in reaction to a Democratic platform, which embraces fast track and rejected amendments for fair trade, a living wage, and universal health care.

Union members and their families, along with thousands of other protesters, were enjoying a concert by Ozomotli when at approximately 8 p.m. the music abruptly stopped and the stage lights went out. An LAPD police commander announced from the stage that he was declaring the event an illegal assembly and ordered the crowd of up to 10,000 to disperse, giving them 15 minutes to do so. Many of the crowd were able to exit the area before the police attacked, but thousands were still struggling to negotiate the narrow exit area and the three foot concrete barriers obstructing it when waves of police on horseback and on foot moved into the crowd and began firing indiscriminately on the fleeing protesters. Scores of protesters were injured, most shot in the back, as they attempted to comply with police orders to disperse.

Labor activist Michael Everett, one of the lead organizers of the rally and protest, said, “Labor is a key component of the Seattle Coalition - when the police attack any one of us, they attack all of us. Make no mistake about it, last night’s attack was an attack on the labor movement and the working families we represent. It marks an ominous new direction for relations between the LAPD and organized labor, and we call for an official apology from the city and from the LAPD. We ask the Democratic Party to publicly renounce and disassociate themselves from this sort of unprovoked and violent attack on labor.”

Source: D2K Labor Organizing Committee

Regulators probe US reliance on temporary workers
Temps may have fewer restrictions on organizing

By Yochi J. Dreazen

Washington, DC, Aug. 15— US companies’ reliance on temporary workers is facing mounting scrutiny from regulators, unions and politicians, setting the stage for skirmishes that could reshape the nation’s labor market.

The biggest challenge comes from the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), which is widely expected later this month to ease long-held restrictions on unionizing temporary workers, a huge victory for the labor movement. On any given day, nearly three million Americans work as temps, so unionizing even a small fraction would be a coup.

The NLRB decision would boost several unions’ efforts to add temporary workers to their ranks, helping to counter a decades-long erosion of membership and prestige. The 13 million-member AFL-CIO, for example, is in the early stage of a drive to unionize temporary construction workers across the country. Even without the NLRB’s aid, the unions have won scattered victories, including a successful drive last year to organize 74,000 temporary health-care workers in California.

“Organizing temporary workers is a big part of the American labor movement’s strategy for organizing new workers,” says Gerald McEntee, president of the 1.3 million-member American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. “It’s an increasingly crucial goal.”

For the second year in a row, Democratic legislators have turned their attention to the burgeoning ranks of temporary workers, an issue that Washington had previously tended to ignore. Two weeks ago, a group of liberal lawmakers introduced legislation designed to protect the rights of “permatemps,” temporary employees who work for the same company for an extended period of time. The bill, however, isn’t considered likely to pass this year.

The legislation comes on the heels of a scathing General Accounting Office study that found many companies attempt “to avoid legal responsibility for workers by claiming that they are not the employer,” while others misclassify their full-time workers as temps to avoid paying them benefits. The report notes that temporary workers are far more likely than full-time workers to have annual family incomes of less than $15,000, and far less likely to receive health or retirement benefits. It also found that the on-again, off-again nature of temporary work precludes many employees from state and federal worker-protection laws because they don’t work enough hours to qualify.

The American Staffing Association, a trade group representing temporary-employment agencies, disputes most of the GAO’s findings. But both sides agree that temporary workers make up more and more of the nation’s work force. Temporary workers accounted for about 2.2% of the nation’s overall work force in 1999, double the 1990 level, according to the ASA, and that percentage is expected to climb still further in coming years. The surge has been a boon for the economy, helping to push unemployment to rock-bottom levels while keeping inflation under wraps. Using temporary workers allows companies to quickly and cheaply find new workers, introducing an element of labor-market flexibility that analysts credit with helping reduce the nation’s jobless rate. Holding a temporary job has also helped many Americans find full-time work. More than 70% of all temps land permanent jobs within one year, with 29% finding the jobs as a direct result of their temporary work assignment, the ASA estimates.

To the unions, however, such benefits carry a heavy human cost. Labor-movement leaders say exploitation of temporary workers is pervasive; many are paid less than full-time workers in identical jobs and are kept in the dark about their rights.

“If giving people decent full-time jobs and benefits and a right to those jobs threatens the economy, that’s not the kind of economy we should really be aiming for in the first place,” says Judy Scott, an attorney representing one of the unions in the NLRB case.

Good or bad, one of the biggest reasons for the explosion in companies’ use of temporary workers has been the decades-old rules that make it all but impossible for temps to join unions alongside a company’s permanent employees. Under the so-called 1973 Greenhoot rule, temporary workers assigned to a unionized company such as General Motors Corp. or Ford Motor Co. are barred from joining a union bargaining unit at the company without the permission of both the company and the staffing agency that sent them. Such consent is rarely granted, and current law leaves the workers little recourse.

“The law as it exists now is weighted completely on the employer side,” says former NLRB Chairman William Gould, now a law professor at Stanford University. “Temporary employees are segregated into second-class status and simply don’t have the rights given to full-time workers.”

That may be about to change. Later this month, the NLRB is widely expected to overturn Greenhoot in a case that has been pending for more than four years. Such a decision would free temporary workers to join union bargaining units alongside a company’s full-time employees, according to lawyers involved with the case. The original case involved workers at Greenhoot Inc., a commercial real-estate company in Washington. Although NLRB spokesman David Parker refuses to comment on which way board members are leaning, both unions and business groups say the board appears poised to hand unions a major victory.

“I fully expect the board to overturn Greenhoot,” says Charles Cohen, a former NLRB board member whose Washington law firm represents the US Chamber of Commerce in opposing the move to ease the rules. “This would permit unions to achieve by regulatory change what they have been unable to achieve through Congress, and it could drastically change how many American businesses operate.”

Messrs. Cohen and Gould, along with other observers, anticipate a decision before NLRB member J. Robert Brame, a Republican, steps down at the end of the month. Members are believed to want to clear the case off the docket before then. The NLRB has generally been reluctant to make major decisions without a full complement of five members, and Mr. Brame’s permanent successor is unlikely to be named until the next president takes office.

Although many business groups say they are resigned to seeing Greenhoot overturned, that hasn’t stopped them from making the case that such a decision would have a chilling effect on many companies’ use of temporary workers. They warn that impeding an employer’s ability to cheaply find new workers when they are needed, for only as long as they are needed, would threaten the low rates of joblessness and inflation that have been commonplace in recent years.

“The long-term danger is that businesses could be deterred from using temporary employment arrangements, and that would be damaging to workers, damaging to businesses and damaging to the economy,” says Edward Lenz, ASA general counsel. “If you reduce labor-market flexibility, you’ll increase unemployment. That’s the price.”

The expected rulings would come as the staffing industry faces a wave of legal challenges from government lawyers, politicians and plaintiffs’ attorneys accusing companies of exploiting their temporary employees. After two years of squabbling, a Labor Department lawsuit accusing Time Warner Inc. of improperly classifying full-time workers as temporary workers to avoid paying health and retirement benefits is set to go to trial. Microsoft Corp., meanwhile, continues to fight a class-action suit by temps seeking stock-option benefits extended to full-time workers in similar positions. In the meantime, lawmakers hope to bring the temporary-worker legislation to a vote in the House and the Senate later this year. The bills would require employee-benefit plans to be based on objective measures, like the number of hours an employee worked at a company in a given year, regardless of whether they were technically full-time or temporary workers. Similar bills have been introduced before on the state and federal level, only to go nowhere, but the legislation’s authors believe the issue finally has political legs.

“There’s a growing awareness that temporary workers get the worst of both worlds: They’re employees in that they don’t have control over their own time like independent contractors do, but they’re not employees in terms of benefits or pay,” says Rep. Robert Andrews, a New Jersey Democrat who sponsored the bill in the House. “And I think more and more people understand that this is an issue of fairness.”

Source : Wall Street Journal