Transport Workers Solidarity Committee

Statement Of The Transport Workers Solidarity Committee To The October 31, 2009 International Labor Conference In Tokyo
Dear Brothers and Sisters,

On behalf of the Transport Workers Solidarity Committee I bring you greetings from transport workers in the United States. The worldwide collapse of capitalism has had a devastating affect on transport workers worldwide with a loss of millions of jobs around the world. In the United States, the unemployment of airline and maritime workers has been radically affected with large layoffs and also wage cuts of 20% to 30% for dockworkers. The deregulation of trucking, rail and the airlines has also increased the health and safety dangers with increased accidents with injuries and deaths of workers and communities.

The growing monopolization of companies in transportation has led to a growing increase in union busting attacks to destroy the strength of organized labor worldwide.

Our committee has supported the formation of an international labor communication network of militant and democratic trade unions that can act in unison to defend workers throughout the world by acts of solidarity.

The failure of the pro-capitalist trade union federations ITF and International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) to respond in action to this crisis offers the potential of a new leadership developing out of the worldwide struggles to defend working people against mass layoffs, dispossession, deregulation and privatization along with repression of democratic and worker’s rights. Their solution is a better tax on the capitalist and speculators instead of workers taking over the industries and running them in the interests of working people. The trillion dollar bailout of the bankers by the Obama administration and capitalist governments around the world has not benefited the interests of the working class and in fact has intensified the struggle.

Top West Coast Teamsters official resigns after settlement in harassment case-Pres Hoffa's Supporter In LA Area

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2009/11/top-teamsters-official-resigns-after-settling-harassment-case-.html

Top Teamsters official resigns after settlement in harassment case
November 4, 2009 | 1:37 pm
A top West Coast Teamsters official has resigned his post amid allegations that he sexually harassed a union secretary.

James A. Santangelo, a 50-year Teamster veteran who was a vice president of the union, resigned Friday from his membership in Local 848 in Covina and was automatically removed from all three elected positions he held with the union, said Bret Caldwell, a Teamsters spokesman in Washington.

Santangelo was president of Teamsters Joint Council 42, based in Covina and representing 129,000 members in California, Hawaii and elsewhere. He also headed Teamsters Local 848.

“He was certainly not forced out, but I can’t speak on his behalf,” Caldwell said of Santangelo, who earned almost $288,000 annually from his union posts, according to federal records.

The reason for Santangelo’s resignation “was not addressed in his resignation letter,” said Caldwell, who could not provide additional details.

YouTube - UK RMT: Picket line solidarity with striking CWU postal workers (22.10.09)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3tDTmlvjhNM

UK RMT: Picket line solidarity with striking CWU postal workers (22.10.09)

Video: UK Postal workers speak out about why they are on strike

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/video/2009/oct/22/post-strike-royal-mail

International Support for Striking UK Postal Workers

http://www.cwu.org/news/archive/support-for-striking-postal-workers.html
Support for Striking Postal Workers
Support for Striking Postal Workers

23rd October 2009

There has been huge support right across the country from the public, politicians and trade unions in the UK and beyond for postal workers striking in the Royal Mail this week. Below is a flavour of some of the support received.

For more information on the dispute and for information about local support groups please go to: http://www.cwu.org/royal-mail-dispute.html

Messages of support have come from the TUC, UK unions including GMB, PCS, UNISON NAPO, Unite, NUT and international unions including FINNISH POST & LOGISTICS UNION (PAU - IN FINLAND), CWA AMERICAATL, CUPW-STTP, and the Green Party and more.

A poll done for BBC Newsnight on Thursday 22nd October showed that twice as many people sympathise with postal workers rather than the Royal Mail management in the postal dispute.
Half of those surveyed (50%) sympathised with the postal workers and the unions as opposed to the Royal Mail management (25%) according to an opinion poll carried out by ComRes for BBC Two's Newsnight. Full data tables available atwww.comres.co.uk.

http://www.newstatesman.com/uk-politics/2009/10/pilger-postal-public-office

The postal strike is our strike
John Pilger
Published 22 October 2009

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New Labour has done its best to destroy the Post Office as a public institution. Postal workers deserve our solidarity

The postal workers' struggle is as vital for democracy as any national event in recent years. The campaign against them is part of a historic shift from the last vestiges of political democracy in Britain to a corporate world of insecurity and war. If the privateers running the Post Office are allowed to win, the regression that now touches all lives bar the wealthy will quicken its pace. A third of British children now live in low-income or impoverished families. One in five young people is denied hope of a decent job or education.

And now the Brown government is to mount a "fire sale" of public assets and services worth £16bn. Unmatched since Margaret Thatcher's transfer of public wealth to a new gross elite, the sale, or theft, will include the Channel Tunnel rail link, bridges, the student loan bank, school playing fields, libraries and public housing estates. The plunder of the National Health Service and public education is already under way.

1.why did you decide to messenger?

I guess I decided to messenger for the same reason as most. I was living in New Orleans at the time, and was about to lose my job. One day I was hanging out downtown trying to figure out what to do with myself. A bike messenger cut through an intersection, and I thought to myself “that looks like a pretty cool job.” I went down to the only company that was hiring, and started working the next day.

2.when did you start? has the time been on/off or straight?

I started messengering in New Orleans in the spring of 2003. The only time that I have ever taken off was the whole month of September in 2005, when Hurricane Katrina hit and the city flooded. I moved up to Chicago because the house I lived in had been destroyed, and it looked like I would be out of a job for a while. I started working in Chicago in October of 2005. So I guess that’s going on six years, and at last count I have worked for nine different messenger companies.

3.what bike did you start on? what do you ride today?

I started on an old Schwinn LeTour road bike. I have a couple of bikes that I use for work now. Most of the time I ride a Capricorn track bike. I had the frame custom made in Wisconsin by Brad Wilson, and then I built the wheels and put it all together myself. It’s filthy, but it is a really sweet bike.

Original message sent 01 September 2007:

Brothers and Sisters,

Tonight the San Francisco Central Labor Council voted unanimously to endorse and support our conference.  The motion, made by ILWU Local 34 delegate Glen Ramiskey, was  seconded and motivated by delegates from the Machinists' Union, SEIU and the SF teachers' union.

Ramiskey, in an impassioned appeal, reminded the delegates that the war abroad is inextricably linked to the war at home. He pointed out that just last week two black ILWU Local 10 longshoremen were maced beaten and arrested in the port of Sacramento by private security guards and the Sheriff's Dept. as part of the "war on terror".* He appealed to the union delegates to support the conference motion and to organize workers' actions against the war through their unions.

Endorsements for the conference now include the British Rail Maritime & Transport Union, Japanese Doro-Chiba, NYC Labor Against the War, and UTLA, the teachers' union in Los Angeles.

The vice-president of the South African Transport Workers Union will speak at the Conference.

- Jack Heyman.  For more info on the conference, contact me at:  jackheyman@comcast.net

By Joseph Plaster - San Francisco Bay Guardian, July 17, 2007

More than 100 tractor trailers were lined up at 6:30 a.m., inching toward the Port of Oakland's Terminal 7, waiting for their next load. Against the backdrop of the San Francisco skyline, a mammoth freight ship emblazoned with the name Hyundai glided toward the port, pregnant with multicolor shipping containers.

A driver told the Guardian that he expected to be in line for at least two hours waiting to drop off the empty container attached to his big rig. His 1989 truck lacks air-conditioning, so the windows were rolled down, allowing diesel exhaust to pollute the air he was breathing.

It's the same scene at many of the port's other terminals: long lines of ancient trucks slowly snaking toward their destinations, their primarily immigrant drivers performing the essential and thankless task of transporting cheap clothes from Asia to the nation's big-box retailers or helping to export California's agricultural goods to Hawaii.

The fourth-busiest container port in the nation, the Port of Oakland is the economic engine of the region, providing thousands of jobs and more than $1 billion in revenue. But activists say that the port system has also led to sweatshoplike conditions for truckers and created a health crisis for the surrounding community.