green unionism

By Valter Sanches -  IndustriALL Global Union, October 20, 2016

As the new General Secretary of IndustriALL Global Union, which represents more than 50 million workers in mining, energy and manufacturing industries in 140 countries, I wish to convey to you my warmest solidarity greetings and support to the London Mining Network’s coordinated demonstration in the context of the BHP Billiton annual shareholders’ meeting.

In particular, IndustriALL Global Union expresses its full support of the victims, both workers and residents, of the Samarco mining dam disaster in Mariana, Brazil on 5 November 2015. This environmental disaster was the result of the collapse of a huge tailings dam at the Samarco Mineração S.A, which is a mine jointly owned by BHP Billiton and the Brazilian company, Vale.

Therefore, it cannot be business as usual at this shareholders’ meeting, the first one since the Samarco disaster. The iron ore tailings dam, under BHP Billiton’s care, maintenance and responsibility collapsed, releasing a toxic wave, which flooded the valley, killing 19 people while injuring others, with an estimated 500 people having been displaced from their homes.

It cannot be business as usual when the sludge and mining residues from the dam reached the River Doce, a source of drinking water in the south east of Brazil. As a result, municipal authorities had to ban the use of river water for human consumption. The contaminated water even reached the Atlantic Ocean.

A separate police investigation has accused Samarco Mineração S.A of wilful misconduct, stating that the company ignored clear signs that the dam was at risk of collapsing. There are also claims that seek to corroborate the police report that Samarco Mineração S.A had been warned about the possibility of the dam collapsing.  We demand a full and impartial investigation of this environmental disaster.

IndustriALL Global Union finds it unacceptable that BHP Billiton has sought to buy its way out of this tragedy, which should not have happened in the first place, by taking charge of only $1.3 billion, a far lower sum than the $8 billion public civil claim instituted by the Brazilian authorities.

It is important to add that several delegates at IndustriALL’s 2nd Congress, which took place in Rio de Janeiro from 4 to 7 October 2016, referred to BHP Billiton as a bad example of company behavior.

As the 5 November anniversary of the disaster approaches, IndustriALL Global Union is preparing to commemorate this tragic event, the worst ever environmental disaster in Brazil’s history. Trade unions, and environmental and human rights organizations will express their full solidarity with those affected, one year on, demanding that all necessary steps be taken to ensure that such an accident never occurs again; that those found responsible be punished to the full extent of the law; and that the River Doce be brought back to its original state.

By Admin - Life Long Wobbly, November 12, 2016

Back to the Future, Part 1:

The last general strike in the US was in Oakland in 1946. That year there were 6 city-wide general strikes, plus nationwide strikes in steel, coal, and rail transport. More than 5 million workers struck in the biggest strike wave of US history. So what happened? Why haven’t we ever gone out like that again? Congress amended US labor law in 1947, adding massive penalties for the very tactics that had allowed strikes to spread and be successful – and the business unions accepted the new laws. In fact, they even went beyond them by voluntarily adding “no-strike clauses” to every union contract for the last 70 years, and agreeing that when they do strike in between contracts it will only be for their own wages and working conditions, not to support anybody else or to apply pressure about things happening in the broader society. When we allowed ourselves to lose our most important weapons 70 years ago, we took the first step towards Trump’s America. We’re stuck in the wrong timeline – if we want to get out, we have to bring the militant labor tactics of 1946 back to the future!

By Admin - Hambach Forest, November 13, 2016

Members of the German trade union ver.di and co-initiators of the amendment to the ver.di Energy Policy have addressed an open letter to Frank Bsirske, the Federal President of this trade union, who is also deputy chairman of the supervisory board of RWE. They urged him to work for the preservation of the Hambach Forest.

Link to the open letter in German

By George Lakey - Waging NonViolence, November 10, 2016

This was a highly emotional election, and we need time to feel our feelings and sort out what it means for us and for the country. Donald Trump is a con man; his game is to manipulate emotions and activists can be as vulnerable as anyone else. Knowing that, we can give ourselves some space to breathe rather than hype each other’s fear. We can also begin to ask, what does his victory mean for social activists on the left?

First, and most obviously, Bernie Sanders was not Trump’s opponent. Many Trump voters liked Sanders for the same reason they supported Trump: He was an outlier who was an alternative to the establishment that has for decades been implementing what billionaire Warren Buffett calls the economic elite’s “class war.”

We activists on the left, even with some disagreements with Sanders, could reasonably regard him as a standard-bearer for us, but that’s not the choice voters made this November. I voted for Hillary without believing for a minute that she was putting forth my politics — or that my politics even got attention in the general election.

What we learn from the vote against Hillary is that many people who are losing the class war don’t like losing, and took it out on a pillar of the establishment. In 2008 and 2012, many white working-class people in the North gave their support to Barack Obama because he was the most credible hope for change, running in each election against a pillar of the establishment. By wide margins they didn’t let the color of his skin prevent them from voting for the chance of a pause in the battering they’d been getting.

For people interested in learning how to make major change in the United States, the electoral arena is only a tiny peephole covered with gauze. Voter participation is low in the United States compared with, say, Scandinavia, and that was true this year, too. Because the election only involves part of the citizenry and is mostly about money, celebrity and manipulation, it tells us little and invites us to make up stories laced with our own fears.

Nevertheless, combing the electoral data can tell us something. Exit polls, for example, tell us that one in five voters who pulled the lever for Trump do not believe he is qualified to be president.

Why vote for someone so unqualified? One answer is because that voter feels certain they know what a second Clinton presidency would bring: unjust policies that further degrade the lives of the oppressed. Here’s the chance for activist empathy, crucial for our having any chance of success in the future: When people so desire change that they will vote for someone they believe unqualified, they are desperate. Activists are used to calling people who are rendered desperate by unjust polices “the oppressed.” If using that name helps us stop othering working-class Trump voters, let’s use that name.

The white working class reading of recent American history may be more accurate than that of many activists. Bill Clinton betrayed the Democratic Party’s traditional working-class base through the North American Free Trade Agreement, destruction of “welfare as we know it,” and subsidizing corporations’ moving industrial jobs overseas. Even when the presidency and both houses of Congress were in the hands of the Democrats, a union movement that worked night and day to get Democratic politicians elected could not get its priorities enacted.

Many in a social class that once believed the Democratic Party was its ally were bound to notice, sooner or later, that the party’s allegiance is elsewhere. I’ve often heard middle-class liberals complain about working-class people voting against their interests, but I’m not hearing them complain that tens of millions of middle-class people vote against their interests – something they do routinely, and did so again by voting for Trump. In fact, the middle class reportedly provided Trump’s most reliable funding during the primary season.

By Arthur Stamoulis - Medium, November 11, 2016

If you read the headlines, Donald Trump’s election has killed the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). The headlines have it wrong.

Donald Trump didn’t kill the TPP. Assuming we see the fight through to the bitter end, it’s the cross-border, cross-sector, progressive “movement of movements” that will have defeated the TPP.

While overshadowed by the horror of Trump’s election, this victory will be one of the biggest wins against concentrated corporate power in our lifetimes, and it holds lessons we should internalize as we steel ourselves for the many challenges we face heading into the Trump years.

Under a banner reading “A New Deal or No Deal,” the first cross-sector demonstration against the TPP in the United States was in June 2010 — a full six years before Trump became the official Republican nominee. Held outside the TPP’s first U.S.-based negotiating round, it featured advocates from the labor, environmental, family farm, consumer, indigenous rights and other social justice movements.

While we didn’t outright oppose the TPP at that time, we warned we would organize against it if it didn’t represent a radical departure from trade deals past that put corporate interests ahead of working families, public health and the environment.

It took years of protests at subsequent rounds in Chicago, Dallas, San Diego, Salt Lake City, Maui and elsewhere — coupled with hundreds of other protests in cities and towns across the U.S. and around the world — to slowly, but surely, put the TPP on progressive groups’ radar.

Over that time, first thousands, then tens of thousands, then hundreds of thousands and then literally millions of Americans signed letters and petitions urging the Obama administration and Congress to abandon TPP negotiations that gave corporate lobbyists a seat at the table, while keeping the public in the dark.

We were up against Wall Street, Big Ag, Big Oil, Big Pharma, the Chamber of Commerce, the Business Roundtable, the President of the United States, the leadership of Congress — in short, we were up against some of the most powerful economic and political interests in human history.

Countless people told us we had no chance of winning. But we persevered.