builders

The workers picketing the Mbombela Stadium site outside Nelspruit include 500 dismissed last Monday, after appealing directly to President Thabo Mbeki to intervene when he visited the site. The Mbombela Stadium Joint Venture fired the workers for an unprotected strike in defiance of earlier agreements.

The workers who are extending a section of the Lewisville High School said they are on go-slow and will continue their protest until their employer meets with them. They are employed by a privately owned construction company based in Kingston.

The workers are also upset that they are being made to work without health insurance.

The workers at the poly poplin unit began the strike at 2pm. Subrata Panda, the owner of Eco Service, the agency that had appointed them, met Citu (Centre of Indian Trade Unions - trade union federation attached to the Communist Party) leaders but in vain. Management sources, however, claimed said the impact of the strike was not felt on the company’s production.

The strikes have virtually paralysed the country as workers nation-wide seek to defend their pensions and protest against a government that has broken its promises.

The first strike was by workers at the Almoayyed Contracting Group, workers were protesting at salaries ranging from 60 to 85 Bahrain dinars (£82-116) They initially demanded a rise to between BHD 100 and BHD 120. The head of the group countered that workers were in fact being paid 75 to 150 dinars a month, he also claimed that only 300 workers joined the strike.

If you want or need help organizing and would like to meet rank and file union members with enough experience of how to help and advise you. Phone UK R&F BWC on 07942 252280. We’ll gladly meet you in a pub or anywhere else you choose after work near your site for a chat.

The Western Telegraph reports:

Three hundred men working for Shaw stopped working at 10 am on Thursday, and marched on the offices of main contractors Chicago Bridge and Iron. The men came out in support of fellow worker, Omar Mohamed, who alleges that he has suffered racial harassment from workers from another company sub contracting to CB&I.

In the latest incident, a worker on a Kier Western site at Cattedown Enterprise Centre was hit on the head by a skip or pallet of bricks, according to the Plymouth Herald. It is believed that the man was walking under a telehandler carrying the bricks when the accident happened.

Some 300-400 workers at the site, currently building a hydro-electric power station, went on strike last Friday in protest at the massive wage arrears. Some 200 hired thugs then attacked the workers. Lei Mingzhong, is reported to be in a coma and brain dead and acccording to doctors has no chance of recovery. Many other workers were injured in the clashes.

The son of a baker born one month after the start of WW2, life was hard, his family sleeping six people in two rooms.

It is as workers that we are attacked and not as students!

Building workers met in London on Monday evening 27th Nov to discuss possibilities for union organising during the preparations for the 2012 Olympics.

Members of all four unions associated within the construction industry were present at the meeting called by the newly-formed Building Workers Rank and File Committee.

1) The fact that eastern European workers got involved. So far capital has more or less managed to use the eastern European countries as a large pool of labour force which could be mobilised for short term projects like large construction projects or the seasonal work in the harvest.

Pete Turner was a South Londoner, who served an apprenticeship as a carpenter, toiled in the building industry for the whole of his working life and died from asbestosis during his retirement. He was a truly sweet man and it was typical, and fitting, that he should have attended Arthur's cremation even though he was wheelchair-bound and breathing via an oxygen cylinder.

The week before Mechanical Installers and Pipe Fitters working for Dahl Jenson found that cheques for the last three weeks work had bounced. With massive amounts of overtime being worked some workers had lost as much as £2,000, although these figures were the exception as the workers calculated that the £55,000 in total owed was split between almost 100 workers.

The bans prevented billions of dollars of development over 4 years, until the campaign was halted by the union leadership.

In 1971 a group of women from the fashionable suburb of Hunter's Hill in New South Wales (NSW), Australia, were trying to save Kelly's Bush, the last remaining open space in that area. Construction firm AV Jennings planned to build luxury houses over the bush land.

In the first test of the Howard Government’s new building and construction IR (Industial Relations) laws, 107 workers and their families will be in court today in Perth, facing prosecution for taking alleged industrial action following the sacking of their union representative. The workers face fines of up to AUS$28,600 (£11,500).

I feel old, I really do. In February 1986 I quit my job at the start of what turned out to be nine months on the dole, and walked straight onto a picket line. The "Laing's Lockout Committee" dispute remains one of the most significant of the post-Miners' Strike era, full of lessons about the possibility of resistance in the face of the most difficult of conditions and determined of opposition.

RTE news reported that Keith Kelly, Billy McClurg and Andrew Clarke told Ms Justice Mary Laffoy today that they would not picket sites operated by Collen Construction.

The three men were previously jailed after refusing to give such an undertaking.