Climate message to transport unions: mobilize in Paris, build alliances back home
This piece was written by Asbjørn Wahl, International Advisor for the Union of Municipal and General Employees, Norway. It was addressed to the Working Group on Climate Change of the International Transport Workers Federation, which he chairs.
. . . The United Steelworkers, which represents 30,000 refinery workers in collective bargaining, tracks workplace deaths. It reports that 27 workers died at refineries in the past five years – more than five a year.
That’s intolerable. And it’s a big part of the reason that 5,000 USW oil and chemical workers, including me, are on unfair labor practice strikes nationwide. We believe not enough is being done to prevent our co-workers from leaving refineries and chemical plants in body bags. None of us wants to be the next to lose his or her life for no good reason.
In what may seem like an unlikely alliance, environmental groups are throwing their full support behind oil industry workers who on Sunday announced a widespread work stoppage over complaints that Big Oil companies "value production and profit over health and safety."
The strike, which marks the largest national strike of oil workers since 1980, was called by the United Steelworkers Union (USW) after negotiations with Royal Dutch Shell, which is leading the industry-wide bargaining effort, broke down.
Greece will hold parliamentary elections on January 25 and Syriza, the left-wing party which has consistently called for debt restructuring and an end to austerity, is leading the polls. The IMF-European Commission-European Central Bank `Troika' are warning of the "threat" of Syriza coming to power and have forcefully indicated their support for Greece's ruling coalition by conditioning further financial support on the re-election of a pliable government.
While the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has claimed that the proposed Keystone XL pipeline would create 250,000 jobs, labor researchers say the jobs figures have been vastly distorted. We speak to Sean Sweeney, director and founder of the Global Labor Institute at Cornell University, and Bruce Hamilton, vice president of Amalgamated Transit Union.
Watch all our reports from the U.N. climate summit in Lima, Peru on our website:
On Saturday, November 29, Québecers braved the cold and took to the streets of Québec and Montréal. Buses were sent hundreds of kilometres across the province to the two cities, where workers from all sectors marched against the province’s planed austerity measures.
The march was organized by a coalition of community, student and labour groups and pulled out more people than any multi-city rally since the Maple Spring of 2012.
In Québec City, it was more people at a march than anyone could even remember.
The international community shares today more scientific evidence than it needs to inform decision-making on climate change. The impacts on people’s lives, livelihoods and prosperity if we fail to act now will be calamitous. Yet the opportunities for social progress and decent work behind an ambitious climate protection agenda are such that it would be irrational to let go this unique time in history where we can still solve the problem.
Here is the text of a leaflet distributed at the BC Federation of Labour Convention in the last week of November, 2014 in Vancouver. Note the appeal at the end of the text forunion members who want to take part in launching a cross-union climate caucus. We welcome emails from any union members who haven't already given us their name and would still like to do so.
Five months after labour and environmental campaigners called on Apple to remove highly toxic chemicals including benzene and n-hexane from its supplier factories in China, the hi-tech multinational has announced it will “explicitly prohibit the use of benzene and n-hexane” at 22 of its final assembly supplier factories employing nearly 500,000 workers.
Since each of us gets only a few minutes for our contributions on such a large subject as climate change, I have chosen to put forward ten brief points for a trade union strategy against climate change. Firstly, I will establish some of the important factual basis on which we have to build our strategies and policies.
Over 300,000 people march through the streets of New York, 21 September 2014.
1. Climate change is not a threat of the future, it is already happening here and now, it is man-made, and the consequences can be catastrophic.
