[OccupyCU] Fwd: Argentine Walmart Employees Strike in Solidarity With US Co-Workers

[Germaine Light]

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Germaine 

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Portside Moderator <moderator at PORTSIDE.ORG>
> Date: December 22, 2012 2:37:42 PM CST
> To: PORTSIDE at LISTS.PORTSIDE.ORG
> Subject: Argentine Walmart Employees Strike in Solidarity With US Co-Workers
> Reply-To: moderator at PORTSIDE.ORG
> 
> Hundreds of Argentina Walmart Employees Went on
> Strike in Solidarity With US Co-Workers
> 
> By Josh Eidelson
> blog
> The Nation
> December 21, 2012
> 
> http://www.thenation.com/blog/171903/hundreds-argentina-walmart-employees-went-strike-solidarity-us-co-workers#
> 
> About 1,000 Walmart workers in Argentina staged
> brief strikes last Friday, a union official told The
> Nation this week.
> 
> Rubén Cortina, the president of the Americas
> division of the global union federation UNI, said
> workers struck in close to ten regions of Argentina,
> and "almost half of the stores had some type of
> strike during the day." He said those strikes
> generally lasted between one and three hours, as
> workers walked off the job to hold demonstrations
> inside or outside their store during part of their
> scheduled shift, then returned to work.
> 
> Cortina said that it appears that "about 3,000
> workers" in Argentina participated in some form of
> action as part of UNI's December 14 Global Day of
> Action to support organizing efforts by the OUR
> Walmart campaign in the United States (that
> campaign is the topic of my feature in this week'
> issue of The Nation). The day included actions in
> ten countries, but Argentina is the only one where
> organizers are reporting that workers went on strike.
> 
> "Our main goal," said Cortina, "is to try to call
> attention to the company, that they should sit down
> and negotiate with unions in the United States."
> Cortina said that many customers who saw the
> workers demonstrating showed "solidarity attitudes,
> singing with us, and making signals with our
> hands." "The exercise of the right to strike," he
> added, "is a very common thing here.. it's not
> something strange for us."
> 
> Walmart did not respond to a Thursday request for
> comment.
> 
> Last week's Day of Action was followed by protests
> this week greeting a ship that activists said was
> unloading Walmart goods from Bangladesh, first on
> Tuesday at the Port of Newark, and then yesterday
> at the Port of Charleston, where union members
> refused for an hour to unload the cargo.
> 
> "When Walmart first came" to Argentina, said
> Cortina, "they were terrible." Early on, he said,
> "workers burned tires and broke windows." To win
> union recognition, Cortina said, "We had to fight
> tough in every place and try to convince [Walmart]
> that they had to talk to us, and they had to adjust
> their way of doing things." To this day, he added,
> "they are not the same as the other retailers. They
> are tougher and that makes us deal with them
> sometimes tougher."
> 
> But Cortina expressed confidence that, with
> international pressure, Walmart would eventually
> change its labor relations in the United States. "At
> the end of the day," he said, "the world is going to
> advance on organizing workers. We are going to
> advance on organizing workers."
> _________
> 
> Josh Eidelson (josheidelson.com) is a Nation
> contributor and was a union organizer for five years.
> He covers labor for as a contributing writer at Salon
> and In These Times
> 
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