electricity
News and articles about work, policy and workers' struggles in the energy sector around the world.
Autoreduction movements in Turin, 1974
Eddy Cherki and Michel Wieviorka's account of the workers' self-reduction of prices movement in the Italian city of Turin in the 1970s.
To consider the new developments in social struggle within Western Europe since 1968, one must turn to Italy. The organization of the worker's movement, often on a mass scale, has assumed original forms. Urban struggles have led to organized union and political neighborhood actions with stakes tied to consumption.
Military and federal police bust Mexican electrical workers' union
Late on Saturday night, around 6,000 Mexican police occupied the various sites of Luz y Fuerza del Centro, central Mexico's state-run electricity company. Immediately following the occupation, President Felipe Calderón issued notice of the company's liquidation, with the termination of some 44,000 jobs.
In the middle of the night last Saturday, President Felipe Calderon sent six thousand soldiers and militarized Federal Police to take over state power company Luz y Fuerza installations in Mexico City and the states of Mexico, Puebla, Morelos, and Hidalgo. Immediately following the takeover, Calderon issued an executive order closing Luz y Fuerza.
Vestas occupiers sacked
On Tuesday night, eleven of the twenty-five Vestas wind turbine workers occupying their plant against closure were fired without offer of redundancy pay.
Eleven of the 25 workers at the Vestas factory in Newport, Isle of Wight, England who have been carrying out a sit-in since Monday July 20 have been sacked with immediate effect.
Olympic site demonstration met with solidarity strike
Workers at the Total refinery at Lindsay have undertaken strike action in support of a demonstration in London for direct employment and against undercutting and subcontracting on construction projects.
Hundreds of building workers, electricians and workers in related trades assembled outside the Olympic construction site on Wednesday to call for jobs to be available to those in the local community, through direct employment on a PAYE basis and in line with agreed pay and conditions.
Energy wildcats continue to spread across the UK
The wave of wildcat strike action that has swept across the UK escalated today as hundreds more workers walked out in the protest at the exclusion of British workers from jobs.
Contract workers from the Sellafield nuclear site in Cumbria, the Heysham nuclear power station in Lancashire and a site at Staythorpe, in Nottinghamshire, joined the unofficial action over the hiring of Italian and Portuguese workers, which local unemployed British workers were unable to apply for on a Lincolnshire power station project.
Wildcat strikes hit Plymouth and Falkirk
Workers at a new nuclear power station in Plymouth and coach builders Alexander Dennis in Falkirk were both on wildcat strike this week.
Sixteen staff were laid off from the Langage power station construction site near Plymouth, and picketed the site on Thursday morning, bringing 350 workers out in support by shift start.
Grenada: electricity workers strike
About 100 employees of the Grenada Electricity Company (GRENLEC) stayed off the job yesterday, for the second consecutive day, to press for a cost of living adjustment to their new wage agreement.
The decision to continue the protest action came after a meeting late Monday, involving GRENLEC Management, the Technical and Allied Workers' Union (TAWU) and Labour Commissioner Cyrus Griffith, failed to reach a clear settlement.
23 day long occupation of major power-plant in northern Greece ends in police repression
After 23 days of blockading the input and output convayor belts of one of the major power-plants of Greece by the Union against Unemployment, demanding re-employment, environmental reform and withdrawal of charges against rebel workers, riot police evicted the Agios Dimitrios Power-Plant occupation. Serious clashes have ensued in efforts to release the arrested Union members.
In the morning of the 10th of May 2008, the residents of Agios Dimitris,a town near the north-Greek city of Kozani, where the National Electric Company (DEH) holds its majors units, employing the vast majority of the working population, having formed a local Union against Unemployment occupied the north gate of the Agios Dimitrios Power-Plant, interrupting the function of the feed-belts carrying l
Jamaican electricity workers wildcat strike
Wildcat industrial action by employees of the Jamaica Public Service Company (JPS) yesterday led to power cuts affecting some 58,000 customers in seven parishes around the country.
The JPS reported last night that customers in sections of Clarendon, Manchester, St Ann, St Catherine, St Elizabeth, St James and St Thomas had lost their supply up to last night because of the action.
The Politics of Fire
Abahlali baseMjondolo has long sought to politicise fire & shit: to show that people suffer fires because electricity is refused, to show that people suffer diarrhoea because clean water is refused. This press release responds to the active and of course armed withdrawal of electricity from the Kennedy Road settlement in February 2008.
Friday, 15 February 2008
Abahlali baseMjondolo Press Release
City Escalates Its War on the Poor
Mass Disconnections from Electricity at Gun Point in the Kennedy Road Settlement
