STRONGER UNIONS

Please do what you can to defend the farm workers’ union in Zimbabwe, GAPWUZ. Just in case you thought Zimbabwe was a problem that had been solved, GAPWUZ is under attack for publishing a report (If something is wrong) which reveals the huge cost to black farm workers of continuing farm seizures. Far more black [...]

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Vancouver’s 2010 Winter Olympics are over, and attention is turning towards London 2012. The Playfair 2012 campaign, backed by the TUC, Labour Behind the Label and many others, has launched a website and a first campaign action, aimed at multinationals Adidas, Nike and Pentland (makers of speedo), urging these three major suppliers of sporting goods to [...]

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It’s official. We’ve sold out. Of tickets, that is, for the Concert for Haiti next week, which Cuba Solidarity Campaign have organised for us. Five hundred people will be cramming into Congress House on Wednesday night to raise funds for Haitian trade unionists, but we can’t take any more. But there are still things you [...]

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The actors who played them* have all been honoured with lifetime achievement awards by the US union SAG – the screen actors’ guild – in what the AFL-CIO almost certainly correctly describes as “the only nationally televised awards show of any kind that honors the work of union members”. Congratulations to all this year’s winners, and [...]

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The recession has hit US unions, in the same way as it has in other developed nations. But while union membership has fallen faster in the private sector than employment, union density has risen in the public sector. And for the first time ever in the US there are now more trade unionists in the public [...]

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News from the International Trade Union Confederation: in the wake of the earthquake in Haiti, the ITUC launched a trade union appeal for humanitarian support for the victims in cooperation with its regional organisation for the Americas, TUCA.  Funds raised under the appeal are primarily being used to supply humanitarian assistance to the ITUC’s Haitian affiliate, [...]

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This weekend, Iranian-Kurdish activist and teacher trade unionist Farzad Kamangar is facing the threat of imminent execution. Please add your name to the Education International protest, and ask friends and colleagues to do the same.
Trade unionists in Iran, like anyone else who objects to what the regime is doing there, are facing more and more [...]

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61 building service workers at the Toronto Dominion Centre in Toronto were locked-out and then fired by their employer when they refused to agree to the gutting of their collective agreement. They were forced to celebrate Christmas on a picket line almost 6 months after being forced off the job. Their union, CEP, is asking [...]

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There is a fairly obscure part of BIS called the National Contact Point for the OECD multinational enterprises guidelines (catchy name, huh?) At the end of October, it created 200 permanent jobs for previously temporary agency workers at a Unilever factory in Pakistan. Ron Oswald, the head of the global union federation IUF, described it [...]

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Japanese trade unions have recorded their first year of growth since 1975, up by 0.4%. The growth was led by impressive rises in the unionisation of part-time workers (up 13.7% to 700,000) and workers in accommodation and food services (up 11.2%). There are just over 10 million union members in Japan, most of them in [...]

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