supermarkets

Michelin - Workers at the factory in Toul (Meurthe et Moselle) began strike action after plans were announced to close it down. As well as occupying and blockading the plant with pickets of burning tyres the 826 workers also confined two managers to their offices during the four-day strike.

Workers at the hypermarket have been on strike since February the first.

The Grand Littoral branch of Carrefour is the only one in the country to have continued action after the national one-day retail strike. As a result Grand Littoral has been entirely closed for nine of the last eleven days.

The strike was organised by the CGT CFDT and FO unions to pressurise management over pay and conditions, specifically part-time working and holiday working in a sector employing over 636,000 people.

The strike began at the Cointe branch of GB (owned by the Carrefour chain) after a union representative was sacked after an accusation that he had altered his timecard. The strike spread to the Flémalle branch the following day and workers walked out at Ans on Saturday. Workers are also currently demanding that the company respect agreed practises over working hours.

The strike will be about half the number of workers who originally voted to strike and a week late, as reported by libcom two weeks ago, this is due to the T&G entering negotiations at several sites across the UK.

Around 2,000 workers will be involved in the strike at plants across the UK including Perthshire, Edinburgh, Cambridgeshire, Suffolk, Essex, Somerset and Wales. 24-hour strikes were also held at sites in Sandycroft, Flintshire (site of the recent airbus wildcats), and Llangefni in October over the same issue.

The workers are formally emplyed by DHL, but any pay increases have to be first authorised by Iceland according to the T&G union. The depot, which employs 250 warehouse operatives and 115 drivers supplies food to 180 Iceland stores in London, the South East and East Anglia. The T&G expects the strike to affect stocks in Iceland stores during the run up to Christmas.

Around 200 workers, or close to the entire shift, walked out of the store in Hialeah Gardens at 9am Monday.

Customers filled shopping trolleys with goods then used them to block the aisles of the Foodtown Tauranga supermarket. Each trolley included a message of support for the locked out workers.

The walkout was against cuts in benefits, and run almost entirely by union leaderships. While the supermarkets lost $2.5bn in profits, they succeeded in beating the strike and imposing the cuts.

Notes on Another Defeat for Workers in the US

Sittingbourne in Kent is not famous for much. It does though claim to have the longest High Street in Britain. If you had walked along it forty years ago you would have passed four fish mongers, seven butchers including a specialist pork one, no less than nine green grocers, four bakers and not a single supermarket (the first one arrived in the mid 1970s).

The strike is organised by the CNT anarcho-syndicalist trade union.

Mercadona, whose slogan translates as "supermarkets of trust", is Spain's biggest national supermarket chain by sales, with 990 outlets across the country and 54,000 workers. The company likes to pride itself on its claim that 100% of its staff have permanent contracts.

The dispute began with the sacking of three members of the anarcho-syndicalist union the CNT working at the centre, the culmination of a campaign of threats by the company against workers unionising at the centre. Even before a strike was declared the company brought in scab workers, attempting to preempt the actions of their own employees.

The GMB union is balloting thousands of members in the company's 19 distribution depots which supply the entire supermarket depot, after talks over a dispute at the Dartford depot broke down late last week.

The supermarket giant Asda has been ordered to pay £850,000 in compensation to employees for unlawfully offering them a financial inducement to give up their union rights in a damning judgment by an employment tribunal yesterday.