16 January, 2014IndustriALL and its affiliates give full support to the new phase of the campaign led by United Steelworkers against Arnold Donald, CEO of Carnival Cruises and director of Crown Holdings for an extreme antiunion behaviour.
Workers of Crown Holdings plant in Canada, members of an IndustriALL affiliate United Steelworkers were forced to go on strike in September last year after they were imposed severe wage cuts up to 42 per cent and demanded serious concessions while the company doubled its profits. This is despite the fact that right before the conflict the company rewarded the Canada plant in Weston, Toronto as the best production site in North America. http://www.industriall-union.org/thousands-protest-against-crown-holdings
In Turkey, Crown Holdings is preventing workers to have a union after workers won a free and democratic election.
Some 10 millions of people, including workers and their families in every part of the world, annually board Carnival Cruises, the largest ship line. This is despite the fact of numerous accidents occurred at the lines of the company over the last two years, including the most dramatic ones like Costa Concordia ship, which sank off the coast of Italy in January 2012 and Carnival Triumph, which was stranded in the Gulf of Mexico for several days because of an engine fire in February 2013.
Reportedly the accidents are due to a combination of company negligence and badly trained crewmembers often employed on precarious conditions.
In a bid to boost the campaign against Carnival Corporations and to bring travel agents into its battle USW sent out an email to some 16,000 agents with questions, "Are Carnival cruises worth recommending? Are travel agents protected?" and cited the above-mentioned accidents as well as other reasons why agents should be wary of selling Carnival cruises.
According to USW, Arnold Donald, President and CEO of Carnival Cruises, holder of M.B.A. degree from Chicago Graduate School and a former Monsanto senior officer, is undermining Carnival's business model that relies on good wages and employer-paid leave to fill Carnival's ships. He applies now similar anti-worker style at Crown Holdings.
Global Unions including IndustriALL, International Union of Food Workers (IUF), and UNI Global Union wrote their letters of protest to Carnival, International Transport Federation (ITF) is taking direct actions of protest.
Send a message to Carnival CEO Arnold Donald and demand to stop union busting at http://www.labourstartcampaigns.net/show_campaign.cgi?c=2114
As part of the campaign, the web based RadioLabour interviewed Joe Drexler, the head of the USW Strategic Campaigns department, who speaks about the campaign directed at Carnival http://www.radiolabour.net/drexler-040114.htm
Some other video materials about the campaign are available below.