On the picket line

Telecommunication workers vote to strike

Ninety-six percent of the nearly 2,900 workers at the business telecommunications company Avaya voted to strike if Communications Workers Local 7777 wasn’t able to resolve issues of job security, outsourcing, wages and health benefits by May 27. The Electrical Workers represent another 600 Avaya workers.

Since the strike vote in mid-May, workers in major customer-service centers in Atlanta, Denver and Oklahoma City showed how they felt about Avaya’s unacceptable health-care proposal by showing up at work one day with crutches and bandages and by staging loud, prolonged periods of sneezing and coughing during the work day. On another day, workers wore black from head to toe to mourn the loss of quality customer service due to Avaya’s anti-union policies.

According to the Denver Business Journal, union and company representatives are continuing to negotiate, for now, past the May 27 deadline.

Foster Farms workers back to table

Negotiations between Foster Farms and the 2,400 workers at the poultry giant’s plant in Livingston, Calif., resumed May 24, after a U.S. district court forced the company back to the table. The workers have been fighting over a year for a wage increase and a contract clause requiring workers to either join the union or pay dues.

Last September Foster Farms refused to negotiate when the two unions representing the workers, the League of Independent Workers of the San Joaquin Valley and the Machinists, merged. Though Foster claimed that the merger was illegal, the court disagreed, forcing Foster Farms back to the table.

Hundreds of workers staged a series of short strikes in October and November 2005 to protest Foster Farms’ failure to negotiate.

But Foster Farms hasn’t gotten the message. “We came in with 16 proposals,” union representative Herman Howell told the Merced Sun-Star on May 25. “And we got 16 ‘nos.’” Two more days of talks in June are scheduled.

Univ. of Oregon grad students win contract

On May 2, graduate teaching fellows at the Univer sity of Oregon won a two-year contract that provides 10 percent higher wages, lower fees and extended health care.

“We teach 30 percent of the classes and we’re only receiving 15 percent of the pay,” Graduate Teaching Fellows Federation organizer David Cecil told the May 26 Oregon Daily Emerald. In fact, a GTFF study showed that the 1,301 GTFs earn 13 percent less than the average teaching assistant.

“We’re very, very much a source of cheap, contingent labor for the university,” said Courtney Smith, incoming GTFF president. “So it’s hard to have them realize what we actually contribute to the university and not just be treated as kids on scholarship. [GTFs] who work really hard are not getting what they deserve, but [now they’ll get] a little more at least.”

The struggle for workers’ rights at all universities continues!

Striking mechanics rally

Mechanics, cleaners and custodians, who’ve been on strike against Northwest Airlines since Aug. 20, rallied on strike day 280, May 26, in St. Paul, Minn., Detroit and other cities in a National Day of Support and Solidarity.

According to a news release from Aircraft Mechanics Fraternal Association Assistant National Director Steve MacFarlane: “All AMFA members from the seven represented carriers [were] called upon to participate in this day of unity. Northwest’s executive management team is still leading a once proud and profitable company into the ground. They must be held accountable and shown to the flying public that they are not deserving of their patronage.” (www.amfanatl.org)

The purpose of the picket line and rally was to “bring the issues of the strike, outsourcing and safety back into the view of the national flying public.”