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Vol. 71/No. 14      April 9, 2007

 
On the Picket Line
 
Shipbuilding workers from India
fight firings in Mississippi
PASCAGOULA, Mississippi—Some 280 contract workers from India are in a battle here against Signal International, a shipbuilding company. Six of these workers were fired March 8 and detained by the company after they began to protest company abuses. Some 200 Indian workers stopped work for seven hours that day forcing the company to release the fired workers and slowing down Signal International’s attempt to immediately put the fired workers on planes back to India.

According to Sabulal Vijayan, one of the fired workers, the company’s agents in India recruited them with promises of visas that would lead to permanent residency in the United States and steady work at the Signal shipyard. Each of the workers paid from $15,000 to $20,000 to come to the United States.

“We were lied to,” Vijayan said at a meeting of 40 Indian workers here several days after the firings. “The company has no plans to help the workers get permanent residency as we were promised. Some workers are being paid less than was agreed to. And we are forced to live in an isolated camp with 20 workers to a trailer and poor food. We pay $35 every day for these inhuman conditions.” Vijayan described working in India and in parts of the Middle East, “but I have never lived in as horrible conditions as what Signal has provided us.”

The company is located a quarter mile down the road from Northrop Grumman where some 8,000 unionists are on strike for better pay and working conditions.

—Paul Mailhot

Unionists in Iowa strike
Smurfit Stone Container plant
Unionists struck the Smurfit Stone Container plant in Sioux City, Iowa, March 15. The workers at this box-making factory are demanding a reduction in overtime hours, and improved pensions and wages. Many are forced to work 12-hour days for most of the week.

The workers rejected the company’s four-year contract offer of a 2 percent raise in the first year and 1 percent in each of the next three years. Of the 82 workers at the plant 53 are members of International Association of Machinists Siouxland Lodge 1426. The dozens of workers on the picket line the first day of the strike were joined by another 20 workers from Smurfit Stone’s Sergeant Bluff plant.

—Brian Williams

United Auto Workers seeks to
organize Kentucky Toyota plant
The United Auto Workers (UAW) is seeking to organize the Toyota assembly plant in Georgetown, Kentucky. According to the union web site, UAW president Ron Gettelfinger and Terry Thurman, the UAW’s head of organizing, said there has been “increased activity” in unionizing workers at the plant, reported the March 13 Detroit News. “Recent media leaks about workers pay there,” the paper states, “indicate Toyota is considering cutting some wages in order to lower overall expenses.”

—Brian Williams
 
 
Related articles:
Can ‘card check’ help reverse U.S. unions’ decline?
 
 
 
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