12 July, 2010
Participants of the recent Joint ICEM-IMF World Conference on Sustainability, June 18-19, Toronto, Canada, adopted unanimously a statement regarding the British Petroleum (BP) oil well blow-out in the Gulf of Mexico.
The statement demands an independent and open inquiry into the causes of the Deepwater Horizon disaster, a process to which trade unions should be granted full insight.
In the years prior to the 20 April oil rig explosion that caused the current disaster, BP had repeatedly made assurances that “best available technology” is in use in all its operations. It has since become clear that this was not true at the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig operation. The Statement demands that “blow out prevention (BOP) systems should have remote control capabilities, for instance acoustic signal actuators, in addition to traditional BOP controls”.
The participants at the Toronto Conference included 270 trade union leaders from the industrial and manufacturing sectors of some 50 countries, affiliated to the International Federation of Chemical, Energy, Mine, and General Workers’ Unions (ICEM), and the International Metalworkers’ Federation (IMF), and the International Textile, Garment, and Leather Workers’ Federation (ITGLWF). In total, the number of workers represented by these organisations and their affiliates exceeds 55 million people and includes the most important unions in the petroleum sector, worldwide.
Local sponsors of the event in Canada included the Communications, Energy, Paperworkers Union of Canada (CEP), the Canadian Auto Workers (CAW), the Power Workers Union (PWU), the United Steelworkers (USW), and the International Association of Machinists (IAM).
See the full statement here.