With all the union busting and union bashing going on by the 1% and their compradors in government, it’s nice to see the labour movement getting some traction.
The next few days in Tennessee and Ontario could move workplace democracy and the 99% ahead significantly, with thousands of new unionized jobs to support families and communities. Here’s how.
Continue reading SUPPORT: Auto Unions in the US and Canada are on a Roll
The best part of the Teamster Local 213 rally in Richmond on Saturday was the humanity: the stage was largely filled with Teamsters telling their stories, showing everyone how this 10 week lockout is affecting them as people, and the “humanity” that IKEA markets itself with around the world.
IKEA made $3.85 billion in profits in 2011. Its founder is worth $52 billion. In the past, the company has prided itself on a family atmosphere, but now they want to break the union in Richmond, BC, then they’ll likely go after the union at their Montreal store, then continue with union-busting in the United States.
You can read about the lockout here and here, then enjoy the human side of the global anti-worker agenda of the 1% in the 3 videos below.
Then, make sure you email IKEA Canada [for your email subject, choose “How us Improve (complaints)”] and phone your local IKEA at 1-866-866-4532 to let them know you are boycotting IKEA until they stop trying to break their unions in Richmond and everywhere. My email to IKEA is at the bottom. Feel free to plagiarize it in any way you like!
Concessionary bargaining is ridiculous, which is what IKEA is after. They want newly hired employees to make less than current employees for doing the same work. They want to restrict access to benefits and contract out work.
This is simply greed: the global 1% not happy with almost $4 billion in profit in 2011. IKEA says they care about their workers, but it’s now profit before people.
When the RCMP monitor protests with video cameras and photos from vantage points up high, it is not that surprising. Watching IKEA’s security forces monitor the perimeter, and videotape and photograph the rally on Saturday, however, was a special new kind of corporate surveillance.
Mark, one of the many, shares IKEA’s human principles, and how they are being perverted by corporate greed.
Theresa, shares her wisdom on gratitude and community and relationships.
Kenji, a new IKEA worker, on what solidarity looks like.
Victor, speaks about how new part-time workers can see their weekly hours can drift below 5 to zero
I can’t remember how many thousands of dollars I’ve spent at IKEA in my life. It’s lots.
But now, for 10 weeks you’ve been locking out your workers. You want to reduce wages and benefits and contract out work.
Ikea made $3.85 billion in 2011. I’m pretty sure your greed is showing.
I will not shop at IKEA until you take all the concessions off the table and settle with your Teamsters local.
And this means I won’t shop at IKEA Coquitlam and I’m working to convince my friends and neighbours to boycott IKEA until you stop trying to pad your multi-billion dollar profit on the backs of your workers.
Get over yourselves and stop trying to break your union.
Thanks!
Ikea, that family-friendly darling of home decor and Swedish innocence is trying to break its union, Teamsters Local 213.
They have locked out their Richmond, BC workers for two months now, while deciding to bargain in reverse: Start with a pathetic offer, then as time goes by, if locked out workers don’t come back, the concessions and contract stripping INCREASE!
By the way, Ikea’s 2011 profit was $3.85 billion. Profit, not revenue. Again, not enough money for the family-owned company! Its founder is worth $52 billion.
Tia reviewed Ikea’s anti-social shenanigans when the lockout hit Day 17. Her piece detailed some of the issues and helped us understand what we can do to help the workers while Ikea tries to smash their union here, before likely taking on their only other unionized store in Canada, in Montreal. This lockout is also an attempt to undermine other union organizing drives, despite the 70% unionization rate of Ikea workers in Sweden.
One thing we can do is to boycott every Ikea in the world, particularly the ones in Richmond and Coquitlam. We can also Occupy Ikea at a rally on July 20 at 11am. Here’s a poster for the rally.
And here are a few other things we should keep in mind.
Should the bill be signed by Mayor Vincent C. Gray (D) and pass a congressional review period, retailers with corporate sales of $1 billion or more and operating in spaces 75,000 square feet or larger would be required to pay employees no less than $12.50 an hour. The city’s minimum wage is $8.25, a dollar higher than the federal minimum wage.
via D.C. Council approves ‘living wage’ bill over Wal-Mart ultimatum – The Washington Post.
If Washington, DC can face down Walmart threats to support a living wage, we should be proud of them and stand up for worker solidarity internationally.
And while we’re figuring out how to fight the repression of the working class, check out this Ikea management training video:
Generating enough media spin to rival a jet engine at take off, the management and PR folks at Ikea Canada want you to believe that their poor little corporation is being held hostage by greedy, soulless union workers in Richmond.
Woe.
Pity poor Ikea.
It’s tough being a multi-national corporation with a reputation for union busting, still more union busting and sundry human rights violations. It is also expensive to flog the entire planet with particle board, Allen Keys and horsemeat tainted foodstuffs. You can’t expect them to provide “coworkers” with a safe, fair and equitable place to work. After all, you can’t have your faecal contaminated Tarta Chokladkrokant and eat it too.
Bottom lines, people. Bottom. Lines.
Meanwhile, back in Lotusland, 300+ workers of the mega-Ikea store in Richmond are embroiled in a rapidly degenerating labor dispute. Members of the Teamsters Local #213 are locked out, and the store continues to skeleton crew it, while management utters threats in the news about further reducing the contract on the table if their slaves picketing staff doesn’t roll over and take the pounding.
It looks like some assembly may be required as things get tense in a labour dispute between some 300 union workers and management at the Richmond Ikea.
Manager Janet McGowan says the store has been operating on limited hours as Teamsters take job action.
But McGowan says they will now play hardball by gradually reducing the contract on the table if the union doesn’t sign soon, “So, on June 3rd, our co-workers would have a phase one offer that they could, in fact, be accepting and then we would give co-workers an additional five days before implementation of phase two and then an additional five days before the implementation of the phase three.”
Phase one would see a 500-dollar signing bonus go bye-bye, by phase three paid sick days would be cut in half.
If Ikea is so moral and fair, as their media relations people would have you think, why have the staff overwhelmingly rejected not one, not two, but THREE different offers by the company to date?
Simple.
Ikea is attempting to drag workers back into the dark ages. Not just because they’re cheap, but because, according to their track record, they also enjoy it.
(Never mind that Richmond-area retail workers reside in one of the most expensive cities in the world. It’s not like they have homes or families, right? Who needs to eat?)
Ikea is not about ensuring fair living wages. It’s about profit. Not people.
Primary contract issues, per Teamsters Local 213’s Facebook page:
I stand in solidarity with these men and women on the picket line.
Having been locked out by my employer for over a month in the summer of 2000, I understand what these people are going through.
Spending your nights and days on a picket line, in all kinds of weather, all times of day, and not knowing what comes next is scary.
Here is what happens:
The first few days are adrenaline-fueled and high-energy. There is solidarity. There is power in numbers. Everyone is prepared to stick it to the man.
As time slithers on, and the rhetoric from the employer grows increasingly hostile, infighting starts. Division.
People start to blame each other. Blame the union. Question whether they made the right choice. Side with the employer. Discomfort and unknowns don’t bring out the best in people.
When weeks near months, people become afraid. Union stipends/wage replacements are not enough in Vancouver. People start looking for other jobs.
The ones who hang in there start to feel guilt, and become compelled to accept whatever comes down the pipe from corporate, just to end the sustained duress.
The media portrays the workers as lazy, ignorant and willfully spiteful. Goodwill diminishes. There is a lack of public support.
The union organizers work hard to rally, but the morale just isn’t there, and their job grows increasingly difficult.
They need support. Your support. Our support. These are families and community members, not a faceless corporate entity.
Ways in which we can help boost the cause of the locked out Ikea workers in Richmond/Teamsters Local 213:
Keep fighting the good fight, folks. Remind them that people need to come BEFORE profit.
By Joel Blok, originally published here.
This summer five years ago, the Board of Directors of the SFSS suspended its office staff, barring them from entering their offices and sending them home. This past Thursday, a different board issued a lockout notice to its office staff, preventing them from work.
In 2006, the rhetorical justification was fiduciary responsibility to the society. This summer, it’s financial responsibility to the student members.
The arguments will be different, and the current board will undoubtedly do its utmost to disassociate itself from 2006. The outcome has yet to be seen. But the goal, invariably, is the same. The board of directors of the SFSS have unilaterally decided to re-structure the student society, and will exhaustively work to rhetorically cloak their own ideological efforts as being in your best interests.
Here’s the structural reality: the SFSS cannot exist without its staff. None of the many services it offers could be accomplished, none of the important campaigns it mounts could be undertaken, none of the advocacy that it does could occur without the honest and sincere labour of the staff of the student society. So how do you radically alter the direction and orientation of your society, with no transparency, accountability or consultation? You replace your staff.
The important lesson that this board apparently learned from 2006 is to undertake this project under a more “legitimate” (though no less antagonistic) means. As there is no contract in force between the SFSS and its employees, the board can, legally under the labour code, lock its workers out. The last time draconian staff re-structuring was afoot, the board was much less sophisticated, and much clumsier, in its approach. This time, you will hear arguments about how student unions and clubs will not be funded, how the membership is being taken advantage of by the “shamefully” high cost of providing fair employment to SFSS staff. You will of course be told of the “intransigence” and “unreasonableness” of the union, who, as of course you all know, are simply unrealistically greedy individuals exploiting the system, and through it, you. You will be told that, in spite of the board’s best intentions, this is the only way the society can fulfill its “constitutional” duties to its membership, and that the “fiscal reality” of the situation is that either you will lose resources and service, or staff will have to be cut.
All of which carefully distracts from the real imperative of the board in a clever sleight of hand. The question really has nothing to do with the fallacious and reductive “staff vs. students” antagonism that is being presented, but rather with the ability of the board to exercise unchecked executive power over the society. Again, there’s a clear manipulation of the market discourse. While employing the staff causes “financial problems”, the real “market value” of their labour is never honestly discussed or disclosed when the management goes after the union.
Anyone who has worked in, for, or with the student society knows categorically the importance of the staff to the organization. Not only does their labour ensure its continued functions, but their expertise and experience, their institutional memory, guarantees that it continues to exist beyond the whims of a one-year-term board. The staff at the SFSS not only actually provides the services that this board will argue they are threatening, but ensures that those services exist in a meaningful way, that students can depend upon them as they undertake their studies, from year to year. Without the SFSS staff none of the services their continued employment is purportedly threatening would exist in the first place. Without the serious responsibility and care they feel towards the students they work for, there’d be no student society to speak of.
The ultimate goal here is not to ensure the “financial viability” of the SFSS; there were plenty of options open to the board both on and off the table before they decided to lockout their employees. The goal is to remove staff from the equation as much as possible so that decisions of the board are increasingly unchecked, to consolidate executive power, and to allow the unfettered re-construction, or more ominously de-construction, of the society as a whole. Like those directors of 2006, this current board is undertaking a project of “staff-restructuring” to re-organize the society as they themselves see fit, without membership input. But don’t worry, this is in your best interest, just trust us.
Joel Blok is a PhD Candidate in the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University, the Chief Steward of the Teaching Support Staff Union, and was a graduate student representative on the Board of the Simon Fraser Student Society once upon a time.
Online activists can join a solidarity group on Facebook, supporting SFSS staff here, or can tweet using #SFUlockout as a hashtag.
In her tired piece on Thursday, Diane Francis employed a sad collection of worker bashing, loose rhetoric and diction to undermine one of the core elements of authentic worker rights in the world: a closed shop.
She is spinning worker rights by simply redefining it as workers having a right to not belong to a union, a classic union busting tactic. This stands in opposition to hard-fought worker rights to legally be able to build solidarity to negotiate benefits and rights for all through the power of solidarity and the threat of a strike, without which, the workers have no real rights.
Really, what rights can workers hope to gain if they need to confront employers on their own.
In her piece, she profiles Jocelyn Dumais:
via Tilting at unions in Quebec. [all emphasis is mine.]