Teamsters: Uribe, Go Home

[Judi Lynn]

Teamsters: Uribe, Go Home

Last update: 12:00 p.m. EDT Sept. 19, 2008

WASHINGTON, Sept 19, 2008 /PRNewswire-USNewswire via COMTEX/ -- Union Protests Colombian President's U.S. Visit To Lobby for Bad Trade Deal

Rank-and-file Teamsters on Friday protested Colombian President Alvaro Uribe's visit to the United States to promote a job-killing trade deal.

Teamsters, with members of other unions and Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch, held signs and passed out fliers in front of the National Press Building. Uribe spoke at the National Press Club to a luncheon gathering.

"We join with our brothers and sisters in Colombia in strongly opposing the Colombia Free Trade Agreement," said Teamsters General President Jim Hoffa. "It's a disgrace to even consider an agreement with the most dangerous country in the world for trade unionists."

Colombia is getting even more dangerous. This year, 40 unionists were murdered with impunity, already more than last year's total of 38.

More:
http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/teamsters-uribe-go-home/story.aspx?guid=%7B9340A67F-F677-41FA-8EE1-05FE462CCA8A%7D&dist=hppr

[EFerrari]

1. Speaking of supporting unions.

Thanks, Judi Lynn.

[Judi Lynn]

2. Did you ever see the stats on how many union workers there were in the U.S. in the '50's,

vs. how many there are now, after the Republicans broke the back of the unions, and weakened them severely?

You probably have noted hearing right wing venom in regularly lashing out at unions. Years ago they insisted they were run by communists, and now they simply claim they are controlled by crime, all neatly sidestepping the fact that if it weren't for unions this country would still be working children, would still be working people without overtime, and without concern to their well being and their safety.

I heard about it the other day and was completely bewildered. All the ground the U.S. made in getting strong, good unions looking out for their workers has been surrendered by constant right-wing assaults on them until there are very few, comparatively.

The new outsourcing, globalization is the next step in being able to avoid paying people for the actual value of their work altogether.

Making a profit always depends on being able to take far more from the employees than they actually earn. That's why slavery was so hard a habit for society to relinquish, since it allowed the powerful to live lavishly upon the backs of people they have decided to view as non-human, or unimportant and far less valuable than them.

I heard only a few days ago of a British slave owner in the Caribbean who told someone that it's far cheaper to just buy more slaves than to try to breed them. Also, that far more slaves were brought over during the slave era than came as free people. Of course so many of them died on the way, as well, and never made it. Considering what they had to look forward to, perhaps it was almost just as well. for them.

It would make the saints weep, to be sure.

It's good to see there's enough left of unions in the U.S. for them to be able to make public stands like the Teamsters on matters concerning workers.

Also, it would be amazing if Republicans actually had the slightest knowledge of what has happened in the workers' movement in the U.S., the murder and terrorism inflicted on union workers trying to get mercy for working people who were being driven to early deaths by people and companies determined to wring every last drop of sweat, every last breath out of them before they died.

Nope, Republicans simply continue their ignorant yammering about how unions drive up prices, and the more ambitious ones of them go to the trouble to infest message boards, throw fits, insult, and otherwise get in the way of people with living consciences who are struggling toward a better, more civilized world.

[Judi Lynn]

3. Labor and the Colombia Free Trade Agreement

FRIDAY 19 SEPTEMBER 2008
Labor and the Colombia Free Trade Agreement
Thursday 18 September 2008
by: Phillip Cryan, Foreign Policy In Focus

When Congress failed to pass the Colombia Free Trade Agreement earlier this year, there was little doubt on either side of the aisle about who should take primary credit for the pact's defeat: organized labor. Whenever Democrats explained their opposition to the agreement, they started and finished with the issue of violence against Colombian labor leaders. At every opportunity they pointed out that Colombia leads the world in assassinations of unionists. To the Bush administration and most Republicans in Congress, the trade pact's failure was a clear case of the AFL-CIO holding their Democratic colleagues hostage.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) summed up the case against the trade deal that ended up winning the day - for the moment, at least - nicely. "Many Democrats continue to have serious concerns about an agreement that creates the highest level of economic integration with a country where workers and their families are routinely murdered and subjected to violence and intimidation for seeking to exercise their most basic economic rights and the perpetrators of the violence have near total impunity," he said. This is different political terrain than where debates over free trade deals are usually fought.

Human Rights

Far more than any previous debate over a trade deal, the political contest over the Colombian agreement has come to focus on questions of basic human rights - and labor rights, in particular - instead of the usual back-and-forth about protectionism, minimum acceptable standards, technical aspects of the agreements' design, and the proper definitions of "free" and "fair." Organized labor in the United States "made Colombia a unified bottom line," said Jeff Crosby, the president of a Communication Workers of America (CWA) local in Lynn, Massachusetts and a longtime activist on Colombia policy within the labor movement. As a result of that political effort, together with the simple fact that "Colombian human rights is so obscene politicians did not want to be associated with it," the trade deal went down, Crosby told me.

"The year 2008 may enter history as the time when the Democratic Party lost its way on trade," a Washington Post editorial mourned. While the Colombian accord was never officially voted down - one of the reasons the debate over its passage is still with us, as we'll see in a minute - it was nevertheless the first bilateral trade deal Congress rejected. For many Democrats (remember Mark Penn, Hillary Clinton's strategist who wound up quitting her campaign over his lobbying for this agreement?) as well as Republicans, this was a sad event indeed. The Post editorial - the title of which likened Democrats' choice to saying "Drop Dead, Colombia" - took on the human rights issues central to the debate directly, castigating opponents of the agreement for their "decreasingly credible claims of a death-squad campaign against Colombia's trade unionists."

Never mind that Colombia's own foreign minister admits her country continues to lead the world in the number of unionists assassinated each year; the numbers assassinated have been going down, and U.S. labor has ulterior motives. Oh, and Colombian President Álvaro Uribe is also a demigod (not to mention the only remaining close ally the United States has in South America), so the "death-squad" claims must be overblown.

More:
http://www.truthout.org/article/labor-and-colombia-free-trade-agreement

[Judi Lynn]

4. To die for: Being a trade union organiser in bottling plants used by Coca-Cola

To die for
Being a trade union organiser in bottling plants used by Coca-Cola in Colombia is a dangerous business - they are prime targets for death squads. Can Coke be held responsible? Mark Thomas follows the trail from Bogotá to New York
The Guardian, Saturday September 20 2008

~snip~
This building is where we meet two men, Giraldo and Manco. They arrive on different days and give their testimonies separately, but they tell the same story. Campaign posters in the room where we talk demand boycotts and justice; the images are of handguns painted in the company colours of red and white. The names and pictures of dead trade unionists are everywhere. Giraldo and Manco knew these men, they were friends and relatives. Now they speak of how they died.

Oscar Alberto Giraldo Arango is 42, but he carries a few more years on his shoulders. Colombia is the most dangerous place in the world for trade unionists - since 1986, 2,500 of them have been killed. "To be a trade unionist in Colombia is to walk with a gravestone on your back," the two men told me the first time we met - and they looked as weary as if they had physically borne their stone.

Giraldo was raised in Carepa, Urabá , in the north-west of the Colombian countryside near the Panama border. He started work bottling Coca-Cola in 1984, at the Bebidas y Alimentos de Urabá (Drinks & Foods of Urabá) bottling plant. When he told his friends, they congratulated him on landing such a good job. And it was, too. The union had done well for the men, securing bonuses, overtime and health benefits. But this was not to last. Graffiti announced the paramilitaries' arrival in Carepa in 1994: "We are here!" Shortly after the graffiti appeared, so did the bodies.

The first Coca-Cola worker and trade unionist in Carepa to be assassinated was José Eleazar Manco, in April 1994. The second was killed days later on April 20. He was Giraldo's brother, Enrique. In the mornings, Enrique travelled to work on the back of a friend's motorbike. Three men emerged from the side of the road and aimed guns at the bike, forcing it to stop. Enrique was dragged off into the bushes.

More:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/sep/20/colombia.cocacola?gusrc=rss&feed=business

[Zorro]

5. Some reported facts regarding the proposed FTA with Colombia

Under the Andean Trade Preference Act (ATPA), many products from Colombia already enter the United States duty-free. This agreement will make duty-free treatment a two-way street between the U.S. and Colombia for the first time. Sounds to me that fighting a FTA hurts US workers.

Over eighty percent of U.S. exports of consumer and industrial products to Colombia will be duty-free immediately upon entry into force of the agreement, and an additional seven percent will be duty free within five years. All remaining tariffs will be eliminated within ten years. That would be a good thing for US workers.

Many products in key U.S. export sectors, such as agriculture and construction equipment, aircraft and parts, auto parts, fertilizers and agro-chemicals, information technology equipment, medical and scientific equipment, and wood will gain immediate duty-free access to Colombia. These are big ticket items, and would certainly help the US balance of trade.

Overall it seems that a FTA with Colombia would be a net benefit for US workers, and increase the number of manufacturing and export jobs.