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Issue No. 176 | 02 May 2003 |
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Solidarity Forever
Interview: Staying Alive Bad Boss: The Ultimate Piss Off Industrial: Last Drinks National Focus: Around the States Politics: Radical Surgery Education: The Price of Missing Out Legal: If At First You Don't Succeed History: Massive Attack Culture: What's Right Review: If He Should Fall Poetry: If I Were a Rich Man Satire: IMF Ensures Iraq Institutes Market Based Looting
The Soapbox Solidarity The Locker Room Postcard Bosswatch
 Is Labor History?Bob Gould Sprays Gerard HendersonWar and PeaceA Strange LightA Little HistoryDoes It Have To Be?
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News Rio Tinto: $40 Million for Boss, Eviction for Workers
More than 2000 Western Australian trade unionists rallied outside the Perth offices of Hammersley Iron demanding a fair go for the miners and steelworkers on May Day before representatives put their cases to shareholders at the nearby AGM of parent company, Rio Tinto. CFMEU speakers at the AGM were joined by five steelworkers from the US and Canada. So convincing was their concerted attack on the credibility of the company's statement of corporate conduct, promising dignity and respect for employees, that the chairman closed the meeting with a reference to their complaints. "I have been attending these meetings for a number of years and this was the first time I have heard a chairman assure shareholders that the company would try to address our issues," CFMEU national secretary John Maitland said. "How far they move remains to be seen." The CFMEU is enraged over Rio Tinto's treatment of five families from Clermont, central Queensland. They are the remnants of 16 union activists sacked five years ago and repeatedly found to have been unjustifiably dismissed. Rio Tinto refuses to re-hire them and has now moved to have them evicted from their homes of up to 15 years. The union is seeking an exceptional matters reinstatement order in the IRC and has offered the company a way out by suggesting re-employment at its new Hail Creek mine. The company has been unresponsive. The five families will be in the Magistrates Court on May 23, with CFMEU support, to try and stave off the eviction orders. "This is our home. It is where our children are growing up but Rio wants to throw us out," miner's wife Jacqui Barnes said. "For years we lived with company smears that our husbands weren't good enough for their jobs then the courts found this was not true, they had been victimised for supporting their union - now this." In the US, Rio Tinto is trying to cut health care benefits from retired steelworkers at its Kennicott Copper plant in Utah. Maitland says it is trying to achieve that by pressuring existing employees over their next agreement. "It's the sort of situation you face when you are reliant on private health care," he says. "It is very relevant to Australians, given what this government is trying to do with Medicare." US, Canadian and Australian union representatives met with Rio Tinto after its AGM. The CFMEU and North American steelworkers have agreed to join forces over social justice and workplace issues with Rio Tinto internationally.
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