Read this article in:
26 September, 2006
Following coordinated discussions today between the 20-million-member ICEM, and affiliated trade unions Transport & General Workers Union (TGWU) of the UK and Fédération Force Ouvrière (FO) Matériaux, Céramique, and Thermique of France, global strategies have been developed related to the economic devastation planned by Imerys to the Cornwall region of the UK.
Meeting in Brussels, home to the ICEM, representatives of the three labour organisations vowed to organise all unions globally which represent workers of the French-based building products company. They will bring attention to the company’s adverse labour relations, as well as to their practice of forced redundancies in the face of massive profits.
Imerys is targeting some 610 jobs to be made redundant late next year in Cornwall, Devon, Lee Moor and St Austell in the South West of England, cuts that will effectively end generations of family-sustaining industrial jobs in the region. TGWU delegates at the meeting noted that Imerys not only failed to offer economic alternatives to the lost jobs, but also offers little in the way of redundancy packages.
French trade union leaders, at recent European Works Council (EWC) meetings, voiced deep opposition to the UK job cuts, as well as to company redundancies made earlier this year at plants in Lamotte-Beuvron, France, and at Lixhe, near Visè in Belgium. Today, they expressed their commitment for the global strategies against Imerys.
FO’s Dominique Guelfucci, Federal Secretary for the Materials and Ceramics section, and FO’s Serge Gonzales, secretary of Imerys’ EWC, are ready to make a visit to the Cornwall area to address union members there.
“We will assist the Imerys workers of the UK to assure that what they are fighting for becomes a reality,” stated Guelfucci. Added Gonzales, “We are prepared to illuminate the anti-social attitudes of Imerys. We see clearly that the company’s agenda is not with workers and that solidarity is urgently needed.”
One immediate strategy resolved at today’s meeting is to form a global network of trade unions representing Imerys’ workers worldwide.
Said ICEM General Secretary Fred Higgs, “We sincerely hope that Imerys absorbs the ever-increasing expressions of solidarity that will now take hold and moves to negotiate an equitable resolution for the workers and the communities in which they live.”
Higgs said it is also paramount that Imerys stops its increasing use of contract workers in the Cornwall region in order that permanent jobs are retained.
Higgs added that the mining operations of Imerys and its predecessor, English China Clay, have literally left deep scars on the landscape. “If they hope to capitalise on the sale of land for other, non-industrial purposes, it is perfectly logical that Imerys makes commitments to the workers, who otherwise might be made redundant for jobs, on land reclamation projects.”
“We welcome the initiatives from the meeting today,” stated Jennie Formby, TGWU National Secretary. “Imerys has failed to negotiate meaningfully with the unions on redundancies. It also has been extremely callous in its regard for the livelihoods of workers, as well as to the communities of the South West as a whole.”
Delegates at the meeting also noted Imerys’ anti-worker attitudes at a USA plant in the state of Alabama as a reason why a global network of unionised workers is necessary.
The ICEM is a Global Union Federation, representing 379 trade unions in 123 countries.