Problem with the boss? Mail Fozzie

On 22 June, dozens of activists where standing at the door of the Assen branch of shoe chain Scapino, making noise and throwing shoes (not at people). Scapino had just suspended one of the most active union members. “If you let that pass, soon there will be no-one left daring to be active for the union,” organiser Bart Plaatje of FNV Bondgenoten said. Therefore, Scapino was selected as the first target of a group of some forty activists which has been formed to support union members who are in trouble.
“Going to court can easily take two years. That’s too long,” Plaatje said. Therefore, a group of activists has been formed that can act fast. The group consists of relatively young union members with diverse backgrounds. Many have their roots in organising campaigns in retail, in cleaning and at the Utrecht academic hospital.
Would it not be better for workers to organise rather than call for help from the outside? Plaatje: “Of course it’s important for them to organise. It shouldn’t be like I’ll call the union, they’ll solve my problem. But sometimes, they need a leg up. At Scapino, local workers were afraid to stand up for their rights, they were afraid of repercussions. Since the protest, the union has become stronger there, new leaders have stepped forward.”
Further, the support the club offers comes with strings attached. “If we help workers at a certain company, we ask them to join the group and help out if there’s a protest at another company. This way, the group grows. After the Assen protest, 8 Scapino workers joined us.”
People who would like to participate in actions can join the Fozziebeer Hyves, the online nerve centre of the group. Workers who require assistance can also report there.

US federation gets leader with ‘fire in belly’

Yesterday, former coal miner Richard Trumka announced his candidacy for president of the AFL-CIO. Media expect that he will be almost certainly elected in September and that he will make the federation more militant while introducing a more strategic approach. “I think he will be a real different type of leader. He has more fire in the belly,” a labour relations professor told the New York Times.
Trumka, now secretary-treasurer of the AFL-CIO, has led strikes against coal companies in the 1980s. According to Reuters, he “harnessed civil disobedience and other tactics of the 1960s-era civil rights movement in leading successful strikes against the mining companies in the 1980s -- sit-ins, blockades of roads, mine occupations, picketing of corporate headquarters, and ensuring media coverage of police dragging away protesting miners.”
Last year, Trumka condemned racism in a speech that has been viewed over half a million times on YouTube and which has helped boost support for Barack Obama among white workers who were hesitant to vote for a black candidate.
Later this month, he will speak to the NAACP, hoping to enter a partnership to help low-wage black workers. “I don’t think we can reach these low-wage workers unless we build these partnerships so that we have entree into their community,” Trumka told the NYT. “My overall goal is to speak for all workers, young and old, union and non-union, and give them a voice.”
Currently, Trumka is involved in efforts to make more strategic use of union-managed pension funds as a lever to change corporate behaviour. He has announced that he will use online social network tools in order to attract new members.
Business groups have reservations about the candidacy of Trumka. A spokesperson of the Chamber of Commerce told the NYT that he is ‘obviously going to be very aggressive’ and that he will demonise employers to drive up membership.
Within union circles, some question whether Trumka is enough of a diplomat to deal with re-emerging tensions within the labour movement.

‘Supermarket fuels racism in meat sector’

Next Friday, British union Unite will table a resolution at the Annual General Meeting of supermarket chain Tesco, criticising the company for allowing exploitation of migrant agency workers in its UK meat and poultry supply chains. While the resolution is unlikely to be passed, it will be supported by a number of institutional investors, The Guardian reports.
Unite says that agency workers at meat factories, most of them migrants, are routinely paid less and treated worse than permanent staff. This would damage race relations and fuel racism, which would be exploited by ‘bootboys’ of the far right BNP.
According to The Guardian, the resolution is the culmination of a four-year campaign by Unite “in which the labour movement has been forced to reinvent itself as it tries to find new levers of power in a globalised, post-Thatcher world.” In 2005, it hired new organisers, some of Polish and Portuguese descent, to organise the meat sector. By now it represents three-quarters of workers in the British poultry industry, many of them immigrants. It also bought sufficient shares in ‘more than one’ supermarket group to table resolutions.
Photo: Jordi Martorell

Organising immigrants through language courses

Providing English language courses can be an effective means to organise immigrant workers, concludes Jason Heyes of Birmingham University on the basis of case studies on efforts of the British unions GMB and Community. While the government has made access to language courses more difficult, the two unions have seized the opportunity by offering free classes to immigrant workers. Even though they did not have to become union members in order to attend the classes, 26 out of 104 participants in the Community project and 500 out of 600-700 participants in the GMB project chose to do so anyway.
Both unions have implemented their projects in collaboration with immigrants’ organisations. For example, GMB became a sponsor of the Polish football team. It refused to work closely with the Catholic church, arguing that this is a conservative institution. Both have also set up specific immigrant workers’ branches.
In addition to the immigrants’ organisations, Community also works with an employment agency. The agency provided workers with information about Community, including application forms. Heyes notes that this collaboration developed at a time when Community, unlike GMB, had not linked its project with a strong focus on organising yet. “Should Community’s migrant worker members begin to develop and pursue their own bargaining objectives, it is questionable whether either party will wish, or be able, to maintain the relationship in the longer term.”
Heyes takes issue with John McIlroy, who has argued that the current emphasis on learning services is detracting British unions from organising. According to Heyes, McIlroy “appears to associate education and training with a servicing model of trade unionism in which members and potential members are conceived of as relatively passive, individual consumers of union services.” However, he argues that learning and education are different from other services in that they are consumed collectively and may lead to more active participation in the union. As an example, he quotes a GMB education officer: “when two people turn up from a workplace or have an issue or a problem, we have asked them whether there is an issue or a problem for the other workers in the workplace. And if there is, we ask them to go back and bring those workers to the centre.”
Jason Heyes (2009), Recruiting and Organising Migrant Workers Through Education and Training: A Comparison of Community and the GMB. Industrial Relations Journal 40(3): 182-97. Image: GMB

French union CGT evacuates ‘sans papiers’

[By Kees Hudig] - An action of the French union CGT on 24 June has created a commotion in Paris. Using violence, a bunch of thugs evacuated a group of undocumented immigrants (‘sans papiers’) who had been occupying a building for a year.
The CGT is one of the five largest French union federations and has long been connected to the Communicst Party, but has increasingly opted for a moderate course since the 1990s.
The sans papiers had been occupying the ‘bourse du travail’ since 2 May 2008. The bourse du travail is a joint office of a number of French trade unions. With the occupation, the sans papiers wanted to obtain regularisation for some 1,300 people. All have jobs and pay taxes. According to an adapted French law, ‘illegals’ can obtain regularisation if they can prove that thye have a job, but in practice this does not always happen and unions have a large say in who gets nominated.
Every Wednesday, a public manifestation was being held near the occupied building, at Place du Châtelet. The CGT thugs attacked during the weekly demo, since many occupiers would be outside attending the demo. They chased away about one hundred occupiers using tear gas and sticks, among other things. Since policemen had been spotted during the attack and riot police was immediately present, it was initially rumoured that the thugs were not union members but dressed-up policemen. This turned out to be untrue. Police surrounded the building after the evacuation and denied the occupiers entrance afterwards.
In a press statement, the union has officially accepted responsibility for the evacuation. According to the statement, it was impossible to enter into a dialogue with the occupiers, and their demands were unrealistic. “We keep fighting for the rights of the undocumented,” the CGT statement concludes.
Organisations of the undocumented are outraged. Read a commentary (in French) here. Report in Libération on the evacuation. Occupiers’ blog. Video shot after the occupation (the slogan: "CGT collabo!" (CGT collaborators!"). The 200 sans papiers who were staying at the Bourse, are now staying in front of the building (and trying to get their possessions back). Photo: bitin.fr

Worker mobilisation challenge for Lidl campaign

A campaign of German union Ver.di to improve the position of workers at the Lidl supermarket chain has been successful in terms of media response. In response to the campaign, Lidl set up a telephone hotline for workers. However, the demand for works councils was not met, Katarzyna Gajewska and Johanna Niesyto conclude in an evaluation.
The campaign, run by four full-time employees at the Ver.di headquarters in Berlin, kicked off with the publication in 2004 of a Lidl Black Book documenting abuses at Lidl branches. As a follow-up, a European Black Book was published in 2006.
The fact that Lidl changed it PR strategy without giving in to key union demands may in fact hamper future campaigns because it will be more difficult to portray the company as ‘unjust’, Gajewska and Niesyto say.
During the campaign, Ver.di signed up several hundred new union members, although local organisers and activists did not feel that the campaign was successful in organising workers. Access to workers is difficult and workers are afraid of repercussions if they join a union. Overcoming these barriers is seen as the main challenge facing Ver.di.
Katarzyna Gajewska and Johanna Niesyto (2009), Organising Campaigns as ‘Revitaliser’ for Trade Unions? The Example of the Lidl Campaign. Industrial Relations Journal 40(2): 156-71.

Global Europe

A number of action groups is waging a critical campaign on the Global Europe strategy of the EU, which aims to “better enable European businesses to win market share worldwide, often in countries where there is virtually no labour legislation and where trade unions are illegal”.
The organisations want to make critical voices heard during the European Election campaign. Among other things, they post text bubbles saying ‘Huh? So what about Global Europe?!’ onto election bills. Further, consultas are held during which shoppers are asked how they feel about the Global Europe strategy.