http://www.mua.org.au/events/460_20080513.html

Back in the Gate: Howard Gone- MUA Here to Stay!

Event date: 31 May 2008
Type:
Location: Brett Park, Five Dock
Time: 11am-4pm
Cost: Free
The Sydney Branch of the MUA invites all members and their families to celebrate the 10 year anniversay of the return to work of Patrick workers with a family carnival and picnic day.

It is hard to believe that 10 years has passed since the Howard Government, Patrick owner Chris Corrigan and others engaged in their criminal conspiracy against the MUA to shed the Australian waterfront of unionised labour.

On April 7 1998, hundreds of guards and dogs stormed the wharves under cover of darkness as Patrick boss Chris Corrigan sacked his entire workforce of 2000 men and women nationwide with the aid of balaclava wearing goons and savage attack dogs. The Australian industrial relations landscape would never be the same again. This vicious attack on wharfies was undertaken with the complete support of the then Howard Government.

What followed was a monstrous battle to stop this criminal injustice perpetrated solely because the 2000 sacked wharfies were members of a union. The reactionary attempts to eradicate waterfront unionism failed because the Australian people rejected such inappropriate tactics that were fundamentally at odds with the aspirations of the Australian people who treasure the concept of a "fair go".

THE FREMANTLE PICKETS

The Patrick Lock-out, April 18th, 1998

And we were there, on Fremantle Harbour, in 1998;
A few at first in the dusk of that day as the hours ebbed
Away into advancing darkness; gathered at the gate to face
The threat of coming hostile force. We were one
Of the picket lines, with all hands on deck now
As we battened down for a stormy night

Near the wharves from which maritime workers',
The wharfies, had been driven by thugs with dogs -
The curs of Corrigan - and here outside high fences
We faced the wrecking of our rights, our working lives,
As all around the Australian coast our union, the MUA,
Would be fighting that same bitter battle tonight.

We were the Fremantle picket lines, the night watch
On the barricades of belief, tired out after
Long days and nights, but still there on guard
At the gates, shoulder to shoulder, and we were resolute.
All week we had heard that farmers were coming,
Truck on truck by the hundred to smash through

Our pickets, but we were a union united, we held the line.
We were steel fired in the furnace of solidarity -
Welded in the links of that living human chain -
Because we were shackled by belief to our principles

Pittsburgh Transit Troubles Continue
Written by Karl Belin
Friday, 11 April 2008

On March 4, the Pittsburgh Tribune Review reported that the Greater Pittsburgh Chamber of Commerce had alerted its members that a strike could be looming this summer for the city’s public transit workers, whose contract expires in June. The article further reported that many of Pittsburgh’s larger companies, such as Highmark, have been calling meetings to find ways to “solve” the issue of transit problems should a strike take place. One option they have come up with is “beefing up company carpool programs,” which in effect means developing a corporate-run scab shuttle service to break the strike

Developments like this are par for the course in Pittsburgh, where in 1992 the State Supreme Court ruled that the city government had the power to intervene and unilaterally break the Amalgamated Transit Union Local 85’s 28-day strike, which brought the city to a stand-still.

Port Authority of Allegheny County (PAT) is the country’s 11th largest public transit system, with 220,000 daily riders who commute on over 1,200 buses and the city’s expanding light rail system (the “T”). PAT has come under increased pressure from the county’s Chief Executive, Dan Onorato, to cut costs, even after massive cuts to services and routes this past summer. For the company, this means cutting into employee benefits and wages.

http://www.eastbayexpress.com/news/agency_fires_driver_over_new_buses/Content?oid=673932

Agency Fires Driver Over New Buses
But driver has last laugh, as court orders AC Transit to reinstate him to position.
By Robert Gammon

April 2, 2008
Ben Harbor.

Drivers can't pull all the way forward at this Solano Avenue bus stop.

Drivers also complain about the quality of their bathrooms.
Ben Harbor found out what happens when you cross a staunch supporter of AC Transit's expensive Belgian buses. The longtime bus driver got in a shouting match a few years ago with Jaimie Levin, the agency's director of marketing and chief cheerleader for the controversial Van Hool buses. After the argument, an angry Levin told Harbor he would regret what happened. Sure enough, a few months later, the public agency fired Harbor. But today, the bus driver is enjoying the last laugh.

The run-in began in early 2004. Harbor and other bus drivers had been complaining that the Van Hools' distinctive three-door design make them tough to maneuver because they require a wide turning radius. At the time, Harbor was driving the old No. 43 line from Oakland to Berkeley. Harbor said that one stop in particular, at Solano and Peralta avenues in North Berkeley, was so tight that it was unsafe to pull a Van Hool completely to the curb.

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2008/apr2008/can-a28.shtml

Toronto Transit workers forced back to work by strike-breaking law

By Carl Bronski
28 April 2008

A thirty-six hour strike by the nine thousand members of Local 113 of the Amalgamated Transit Workers union ended abruptly Sunday afternoon, when the trade union-backed New Democratic Party joined with the other two parties in the Ontario legislature to unanimously pass an emergency back-to-work order.

The legislation, initiated by Liberal provincial Premier Dalton McGuinty, calls for the appointment of a labour arbitrator to decide outstanding issues in the dispute between the union and the Toronto Transit Commission (TTC). The order also threatened a two thousand dollar per day fine for any transit worker defying the law and a twenty-five thousand dollar per day penalty for the union should it resist the order.

Just as they did with the garbage strike in Toronto in 2002, Howard Hampton and the other New Democratic Party members of the assembly wholeheartedly supported the Liberals and Conservatives in their rush to crush the strike. The legislation was also heralded by Toronto Mayor David Miller, a Clintonesque politician who has received support from the unofficial NDP group in city council, even whilst overseeing a fifteen year tax plan that is geared toward massively redistributing wealth in the city from tenants and homeowners to big commercial interests.

Disclaimer - The opinions of the author do not necessarily match those of the TWSC. This article is reposted in accordance to Fair Use guidelines.

By Matt Smith - San Francisco Weekly, February 6, 2008

Imploding U.S. mortgage markets leave behind trillions of dollars in economic damage. The dollar's slide against the euro and the yuan raises fears of a currency collapse. January job losses portend recession.

To these threats to U.S. economic stability, add a new and severe one that is brewing in the conference rooms of the Cathedral Hill Hotel, a blue-collar establishment on Van Ness. There, West Coast dockworkers' representatives are devising a strategy to renegotiate a unified ports agreement with shipping companies that is scheduled to expire July 1. If the renegotiation is as fractious as it was in 2002 — when shippers attempted to break the union by shutting down 29 West Coast ports for 10 days — an extended dispute could paralyze U.S. economic activity and send financial markets tumbling.

A shutdown like the last one "carries the very real risk of triggering a sudden crisis in international financial markets," U.C. Berkeley professor Stephen Cohen, co-director of the Berkeley Roundtable on the International Economy, wrote in a 2002 paper. When I spoke with him last week, he said he'd be watching the situation this time, too: "I don't think the significance is any different. At some point, you start running out of parts, and the factory stops, and the factory that relies on that factory for components stops, and you have a chain reaction that's really rather a nightmare."

By Oscar the Grouch (with apologies to the Children's Television Workshop)

The following editorial is the opinion of the author, alone.

The lockout of Garbage Haulers in the East Bay is entering its third week. Waste Management is waging blatant class war on the garbage workers and working people of Alameda County in the east Bay Area.

The following article, featured in a recent issue of Socialist Worker makes it clear that Waste Management planned to bust the union from the get-go.

Worse still, the San Francisco Chronicle reports that Waste Management is ordering scab drivers to pick up trash in rich neighborhoods while ignoring the residents in poor and working class neighborhoods, subjecting the working class to disease and pestilence.

May 21, 2007

Rail workers in Iraq continue their indefinite strike this morning, demanding a pay raise and increased on the job security from attacks. According to the International Transport Worker¹s Federation the workers walked off the job last Tuesday essentially paralyzing transportation along the North/South rail corridor. Rail and public sector workers do not have the right to strike in the war torn Middle Eastern country.

Listen Here: audio file.

from the [NEW YORK] CHIEF-LEADER:

TWU Politics Hampers Safety
To the Editor:

I knew and worked with Track Workers Danny Boggs and Marvin Franklin. Their premature,
utterly unnecessary deaths anger me more than words can express.

From September 1991 through December 2000, I served as an elected vice-chair of Local
100's Track Division Safety Committee, most of that time with sole responsibility for the
night tour. In all that decade, on my tour, when more than half the track work gets done,
there was not one on-track death of a Track Worker.

What's different today?

In the 2002 New York City Transit/Transport Workers' Union contract, the union won
unprecedented safety provisions that drew applause from union safety advocates across the
country. We won the right to refuse unsafe work without penalty, and, in addition, a
system of daily accident reporting by the employer to the union, so that unsafe
conditions could be identified and fixed immediately.

So why, despite stronger contractual safety protection than ever, do we now have more
deaths and near-misses on the tracks, in a shorter period of time than anyone now working
can recall ever happening before?

Locked-Out CN Employees Launch RAILWORKERS SOLIDARITY FUND Dear Brother and Sister UTU members across Canada.

We speak to you on behalf of the members of Locals 1778, 701, 691 and other workers who answered the call to resume picket action and are now locked out.

By locking-out some employees while others continue to work, CN hopes to divide and conquer, to weaken all of us in our attempt to get an improved collective agreement.

Our selected and rotating picket is designed to "encourage" the employer back to the table for meaningful bargaining without harm or disruption to Canadians and to the economy. It is about pressuring CN to come back to the table to get a better deal for all UTU members. Period.

When members of the "targeted" locals answered the call, we did so in the spirit of solidarity. After all, we will all share the benefits of an improved collective agreement, irrespective of who is picketing, who is locked out and who is working.

We now know that CN has refused to improve upon the rejected deal when they met our negotiators on April 14th. But we also know the only way to move this employer is by demonstrating solidarity between those working and those locked out in common cause to achieve a better contract.