—ON THE PICKET LINE—

Maggie Trowe, Editor

 

London rail workers hold 2-day strike against anti-union drive

LONDON — Rail workers, members of the RMT union, shut down KeolisAmey Docklands Light Railway service in East London for 48 hours Nov. 3-5.

“There are 13 issues in this strike, but they all boil down to one: KeolisAmey,” Darren Arnold, a steward in the control room and a member of the union negotiating committee, told the Militant on the picket line.

The unionists voted 92 percent to strike against the growing use of staffing agency work, training of managers to do safety-critical jobs and “a creeping culture of bullying and intimidation of staff,” a union press release said. This is the first strike in 28 years to shut down the railway, which includes connections between London’s two financial districts and City airport.

Training managers to perform work of control room technicians responsible for the track power supply “is a major safety concern,” Arnold said. “They may get trained but won’t be doing it for two to three months, so they won’t be in practice. This was the main reason we had to strike now. We can’t just go on talking for six months when workers’ lives are being endangered on the tracks.”

The company has hired lower-paid agency workers in customer service and P-way (track maintenance). “At first they said it was for seasonal work on the P-way,” Arnold said. “But now they have six agency workers on every shift.”

The union has contested workers being disciplined for taking time off after being assaulted on the job or after a “one under,” when a person gets hit by the train.

Fifty workers gathered at the gates of Poplar Depot Nov. 9 to discuss the next steps in their fight. Stewards coming out of a meeting with management reported that there’s no agreement on any of the issues in dispute and presented proposals for further union action.

— Ögmundur Jónsson

Toronto janitors protest firings, picket for union, pay raise

TORONTO — Janitors and supporters organized a lunch-hour picket Nov. 10 in front of Dream Office REIT property management downtown here. The nearly two dozen workers, who want to be represented by Service Employees International Union Local 2, were demanding the company require its contractors to comply with labor laws.

The workers say contractor Amphora Maintenance Ltd. fired 14 cleaners for union-organizing activity. They demand Amphora pay more than $25,000 in termination and severance pay.

The janitors also accuse Impact Cleaning Services Ltd., another contractor, of paying less than the Ontario provincial minimum wage and vacation pay, and they demand more than $18,000 in compensation.

Several Filipino organizations who support the fight of the majority-Filipino workforce issued a statement distributed at the picket defending the workers’ “right to work in healthy and safe working environments” and “to form a workers union to be recognized and upheld!”

— Tony Di Felice