The company reviled by mine workers around the world for its union-busting activities is at it again. On Sunday Rio Tinto locked out roughly 540 unionized workers at its huge Borax mine in Boron, California and replaced them with a non-unionized workforce. Members of the International Longshore & Warehouse Union Local 30 are now organizing to ensure that workers and their families will have enough food and other necessities while they are out of work.
“People here are tough and willing to see this through to the end,” union spokesman Craig Merrilees said. “It’s not just about Rio Tinto but all the companies doing this to people across the country. In this little town people are drawing the line.”
Workers at Local 130 have received support over the past few months from a number of unions around the world, including the Maritime Union of Australia, the Construction Forestry and Mining Union, Mining and Energy Division (CFMEU) and mine workers’ unions in Denmark, Poland, Turkey and India. Today, the International Federation of Chemical, Energy, Mine, and General Workers’ Unions (ICEM), offered its support. The ICEM represents 20 million workers worldwide from 467 affiliated trade unions in 132 countries.
According to an ICEM news release:
“We note that all 500 members of ILWU Local 30 voted against the company’s contract proposal on Saturday night,” said ICEM General Secretary Manfred Warda. “This should have served as a message to Rio Tinto Minerals to continue negotiating, continue seeking the necessary compromises in order to achieve a mutually acceptable collective agreement.”
A prior contract expired on 4 November 2009. Management is seeking unprecedented changes to workers’ seniority, shift and overtime assignments, and the way in which promotions are made, as well as seeking unilaterally to impose flexibility changes that favour the company to the detriment of workers.
The ICEM will use its role, as the leading Global Union Federation in the mining industry, to alert trade unions around the globe, particularly those representing Rio Tinto workers, of the lockout and urge them to take action on behalf of ILWU Local 30 in California.
In an October 15 statement the Maritime Union and CFMEU said:
“While our Unions have had a long and bitter experience with Rio Tinto and their anti-union, anti-workforce tactics and policies here in Australia, we continue to be amazed at the way in which multi national corporations like Rio Tinto, demand and expect working men and women to sacrifice hard won conditions of employment in order to prop up already bloated corporate profits.”
“I think it will be pretty traumatic,” said Jim Freeman, 54, who has worked at the mine for 31 years. “I think the company had the impression we were going to roll over and let them feed us the poison.”
Dean Gehring, general manager of the mine, told the Los Angeles Times Rio Tinto would not be negotiating with the union ”any time in the near future” and that, because of the threat of a strike, the company had to lock the workers out in order to remain globally competitive.
LSMN
Eve Divine
doncorvette
[...] Dean Gehring, general manager of the mine, told the Los Angeles Times Rio Tinto would not be negotiating with the union “any time in the near future” and that, because of the threat of a strike, the company had to lock the workers out in order to remain globally competitive. [...]
[...] well, reports the company’s Chief Financial Officer, Guy Elliott, only two days after the company locked out over 500 workers at its Borax mine, in southern [...]