Monday, February 4, 2013

Victaulic, union agree to contract that includes wage increases


http://www.lehighvalleylive.com/easton/index.ssf/2013/02/victaulic_union_agree_to_contr.html

 Union workers for Victaulic Corp. have accepted a three-year contract offer from the Forks Township mechanical piping solutions provider.
Jerry Green, president of United Steelworkers Local 2599, said workers voted today in favor of the contract during a meeting at union headquarters at Van Bittner Hall in Bethlehem. He estimated about 130 of the union’s 210 workers attended the discussion and seven voted against it.

“Both parties took into consideration the economic climate and worked diligently to reach a fair agreement and avoid any chances of a possible work stoppage,” Green said.
The contract includes wage increases of 2 percent in the first.......

Foxconn plans Chinese union vote

http://edition.cnn.com/2013/02/03/business/china-foxconn-union/
(Financial Times) -- Foxconn, the contract manufacturer whose biggest customer is Apple, is preparing genuinely representative labour union elections in its factories in China for the first time, a powerful sign of the changes in the workshop of the world demanded by an increasingly restive workforce.

This would be the first such exercise at a large company in China, where labour unions have traditionally been controlled by management and local government. Foxconn is the country's largest private sector employer with 1.2m mainland workers.

NIOSH OSH Bulletin

Claiming foreign worker levy a discrimination, MTUC to complain to ILO


Malaysia’s largest labour group lashed out today at the administration for reinstating a 21-year-old levy on foreign workers, a policy it said discriminates against migrant workers and said it will file an official complaint on the move with the International Labour Organisation (ILO).
But separately an employers group backed the Cabinet decision to reinstate the levy, saying it will profit the country by boosting job opportunities for locals and reverse an annual RM2 billion cash outflow.
“Government’s sudden reversal of its policy requiring employers to pay the annual foreign worker levy is a great injustice against migrant workers,” the Malaysian Trades Unions Congress (MTUC) secretary-general Abdul Halim Mansor said in a statement today.
He noted that the federal government had four years ago decided to collect the tax it introduced in 1992 from employers instead of from workers, in a bid to cut dependence on foreign labour.

Abdul Halim said that at every stage of deliberation the National Wages Council and the Cabinet had intentionally decided that the new floor wage plan which was supposed to take effect from the start of this year was to apply to all workers “including two million migrant workers so as to demonstrate to the world that Malaysia does not practise discrimination against migrant workers”

Teachers' Union Members Join Bus Drivers' Picket Lines

The teacher's union is showing its support for striking bus drivers and matrons.
Members of the United Federation of Teachers joined a picket line in the Castle Hill section of the Bronx on Saturday.
They say the UFT and Amalgamated Transit Union Local 1181 have to stick together against the city.
"I'm here to support 1181 because at the end of the day I am a union member. I am labor. Together we will make the city move all along," said UFT member Jose Vargas. "And if we don't support each other the city will continue to try to break us apart so that they get their way which is not always in the best benefit of the students that we serve, nor the public in general."
The bus drivers and matrons want job protections included in the city's new bus contracts, but the city says it cannot legally keep those protections.
Negotiations between the union and bus companies are set to pick up again Tuesday.
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