Thread: Unions
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Old 12-06-2003, 09:56 PM   #72 (permalink)
redravin40
Loser
 
Location: With Jadzia
My sense of history tends to make my examples seem irrelevant so lets try something a bit more current.

Reduced power of unions=

Tyson Chicken Factory Fire in which there was 25 deaths and 54 people injured. No inspections or union representaion. Some of the doors were locked to keep people from taking breaks.

LINK

Sweat shops

On August 2, 1995, a multi-agency task force led by the California Department of Industrial Relations raided a fenced seven-unit apartment complex in El Monte, California, a small community near Los Angeles. What they found was one of the most horrendous U.S. sweatshops in modern times.

Law enforcement officers arrested eight operators of a Chinese-Thai, family-owned garment sweatshop and freed 72 illegal Thai immigrants. The workers, most of them women, had been held in virtual slavery behind fences tipped with razor wire and forced to sew garments in conditions significantly worse than those found in most sweatshops.

LINK


No overtime, breaks and having to work off the clock...


Wal-Mart sued for labor abuses
BY JULIE FORSTER
Pioneer Press

Debbie Simonson was asked to straighten up her area of the Wal-Mart store in Brooklyn Park at the beginning and end of her shifts when she worked there in 2000 and 2001. She followed her supervisor's requests to work "off the clock," passing out promotional items to customers, assembling candy bags and clearing carts from the parking lot.

Most often, she didn't get meal or rest breaks, and after she was promoted to supervise cashiers, the store was so understaffed that there was never anyone to relieve them for breaks.

She complained to higher-ups but nothing changed. "They didn't care," she said. "It wasn't a priority."

Now Simonson is fighting back by suing her former employer, the nation's largest retailer. On Friday, she and three other women will ask a Dakota County District Court to give them class-action status on behalf of 63,000 current and former workers in Minnesota. Their lawyers estimate that Wal-Mart workers across the state lost tens of millions of dollars in wages and 500,000 hours of breaks per year since 1998.

Link

And as an example of the measures an American Steel company will take to stop a union lets visit Columbia...

ILRF and the United Steelworkers of America filed a suit against the Drummond Company, an Alabama-based mining corporation with facilities in La Loma, Colombia, on behalf of the families of slain workers and their labor union. The suit, filed in US District Court for the Northern District of Alabama on March 14, 2002, charges the company with hiring paramilitary gunmen to torture, kidnap and murder union leaders.

LINK

Last edited by redravin40; 12-06-2003 at 10:04 PM..
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