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13 July, 2009
Workers at the Bridgestone aerospace tyre plant in Frameries, Belgium, will hit the five-week mark on strike this Thursday, 16 July. The strike was brought on by the Japanese-based company’s refusal to negotiate. A company decision on whether or not to close down a 140-worker re-treading factory in Frameries has not been communicated to workers and their majority representative, Belgian affiliate Centrale Générale-FGTB, and the union exhausted all legal means before striking on 11 June.
That strike came when Bridgestone unilaterally decided to dismiss all 8 workers in one area of the factory without proper social talks. Many of those workers had been on the job for over 20 years. One of the dismissed workers is a senior trade union officer and secretary of the Works Council, who has been working at the plant since 1980.
Bridgestone has disrupting social harmony in Frameries, despite a formal commitment to protect jobs in the current collective bargaining agreement. Centrale Générale-FGTB insisted that the company exam all options to safeguard employment, including part-time redundancy, early retirement, in-house transfers, time credit, or other such social options. The union also stresses that 14 workers are employed at Frameries on short-term contracts.
Local management at Bridgestone-Frameries has continued its anti-labour practices throughout the strike. Instead of seeking reasonable solutions through dialogue, managers will not even answer telephone calls to address issues.
Centrale Générale-FGTB condemns such practices, calling them immoral and reprehensible and also condemns the company for criminalizing its own workers who are only defending their rights.
The ICEM also condemns such social behaviour. “At the heart of Europe, in Belgium, a multinational company is deciding on issues of employment outside the lawful prerequisites of the social model,” said General Secretary Manfred Warda. He added that ICEM’s Bridgestone Global Union Network addressed this strike recently in its deliberations and put the issue forward to Japanese senior management.
Bridgestone on the corporate level has not responded. The ICEM is asking global affiliates to send a solidarity message in your own words and your own language to Bridgestone-Frameries workers by clicking here.