Tag Archives: Strike

Some U.S. schools to close Wednesday as women request day off to protest

(Reuters) – At least two U.S. school districts have announced plans to close on Wednesday in anticipation of staff shortages for the nationwide “Day Without A Woman” strike.

The one-day protest, which is being held in conjunction with International Women’s Day, is intended to draw attention to the plight of women in the workplace who on average are paid less than men.

The protest is already affecting dozens of schools, which are heavily staffed by women. The strike organizers include some of the planners of the Jan. 21 women’s march on Washington and other U.S. cities.

In Alexandria, Virginia, just outside Washington, D.C., Superintendent of Schools Alvin Crawley said classes for the entire district, which serves more than 15,000 students, would be canceled on Wednesday after 300 teachers and other staff members asked to have the day off.

“The decision is based solely on our ability to provide sufficient staff to cover all our classrooms, and the impact of high staff absenteeism on student safety and delivery of instruction,” Crawley said in an announcement.

Also canceling classes for the day are Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools in North Carolina, where officials anticipated that 400 to 2,000 staffers would not show up for work. The district, which encompasses 21 schools, said absences on a typical day number around 100 staffers, or 5 percent of its workforce.

The school district stressed that the decision to close was based on student safety and was not meant as a political statement.

(Reporting by Peter Szekely in New York; Editing by Leslie Adler)

UPS air maintenance workers vote 98 percent to authorize strike

United Parcel Service aircraft are loaded with package containers at the UPS Worldport All Points International Hub in Louisville, Kentucky,

By Nick Carey

CHICAGO (Reuters) – Air maintenance workers at United Parcel Service Inc have voted overwhelmingly to authorize a strike against the world’s largest package delivery company as contract talks remained deadlocked over health-care benefits, the workers’ union said on Monday.

Teamsters Local 2727 said 98 percent of those who took part in a mail-in ballot voted to authorize strike action. Eighty percent of the local’s 1,200 members participated in the ballot.

Contract talks have been ongoing for three years. If they remain deadlocked Monday, union representatives say they will begin the process that could lead to a strike within 60 days.

The main sticking point has been healthcare benefits. The Teamsters say UPS is demanding major concessions, including a massive spike in retiree contributions for health-care costs.

“UPS wants huge concessions and our members are not willing to take them,” Local 2727 President Tim Boyle said. “We’re not asking for anything we don’t already have and this demonstrates our members are willing to strike.”The air maintenance staff work at hubs around the United States, with more than one-third in Louisville, Kentucky, which is UPS’ main hub.

A strike could ground UPS’ airplanes, affecting packages shipped by air. While it would not halt all deliveries, it would be a major disruption.

The air maintenance workers are governed by the U.S. Railway Labor Act, which only permits strikes after negotiations and mediation have failed.

If talks remain deadlocked Monday, the Teamsters say they will ask the federal mediator overseeing negotiations to release the union from the bargaining table. If there is no resolution after a 30-day cooling-off period, a board appointed by the president would have to rule on a strike, which would take up to 30 days.

A strike would be highly unlikely during UPS’ crucial holiday peak season this year. But it could go before the presidential board before President Barack Obama leaves office in January.

Kevin Gawlik, an air mechanic for 20 years who works at a UPS air hub in Rockford, Illinois, voted to strike. He said the work is tough and can result in health problems, including hearing loss from working around jet engines.

“That’s why I’m willing to walk out and strike to keep my benefits,” Gawlik, 49, said.

(Editing by Jeffrey Benkoe)

UK government condemns ‘irresponsible’ English five day doctor strike

Britain's Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt arrives to attend a cabinet meeting at Number 10 Downing Street in London, Britain

The government says the new arrangements are part of its plan to bring in a safer and fuller seven-day health service, but the doctors say it will result in them working longer hours at anti-social times, putting patients at risk.

“The way to resolve those differences is to sit round the table to talk, it is cooperation and dialogue, it is not confrontation and strikes. That is why I think this action is totally irresponsible,” Hunt told BBC Radio.

He said around 100,000 operations could be canceled as a result of the action.

In May, the BMA and the government reached a deal to end the standoff but its members then voted to reject the new terms and conditions.

The BMA said concerns focus on the impact the contract will have on part-time workers and those who work the most weekends.

“This is not a situation junior doctors wanted to find themselves in … but in forcing through a contract that junior doctors have rejected and which they don’t believe is good for their patients or themselves, the government has left them with no other choice,” BMA junior doctor committee chair Ellen McCourt said in a statement.

There are some 55,000 junior doctors in England, about a third of the medical workforce. NHS services in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, are managed separately from England.

(Reporting by Kylie MacLellan)

More than a million Indian workers to go on strike Friday

An employee walks out of the State Bank of India main branch in Mumbai, India,

By Manoj Kumar

NEW DELHI (Reuters) – More than a million Indian workers in banking, telecoms and other sectors will go on strike on Friday, seeking higher wages and to protest against Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s labor reforms and a plan to close some loss-making firms.

Trade unions including the All India Trade Unions Congress and Centre of Indian Trade Unions rejected a government appeal on Tuesday to call off the strike, saying it failed to address their demands.

Since taking charge in May 2014, Modi has implemented a raft of economic reforms and is trying to ease labor laws to attract foreign investment and make it easier to do business in the country.

The government aims to raise 560 billion rupees ($8.35 billion) through privatization this fiscal year, and shut down some companies. Losses at 77 state-run companies exceeded $4 billion in the last fiscal year.

Tapan Sen, general secretary of the Centre of Trade Unions, said there had not been any “tangible proactive steps” by the government to address union demands such as a rollback of privatization in sectors like defense and railways, and an increase in minimum wages.

He said the strike would go on despite Finance Minister Arun Jaitley’s promise on Tuesday that the government would release state employees’ bonuses for the last two years, and increase minimum wages for unskilled laborers.

The unions also oppose a government directive to state-run pension funds to put more money into stock markets.

Another major union, the Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh, which is loosely affiliated with the Hindu nationalist group Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the ideological parent of Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party, is not joining the strike.

Some workers at Coal India Ltd  are due to join the strike but company officials said they did not expect any shortfall in supplies for power companies as there was an oversupply of the fuel.

($1 = 67.0300 Indian rupees)

(Reporting by Manoj Kumar; Editing by)

Rubbish piles up in Paris as pre-euro soccer protests go on

Rubbish piled up on streets in parts of Paris and other French cities on Wednesday as strikes and pickets by waste treatment workers

By Brian Love and Lucien Libert

PARIS (Reuters) – Rubbish piled up on streets in parts of Paris and other French cities on Wednesday as strikes and pickets by waste treatment workers took a toll in the country which hosts the Euro 2016 soccer tournament from Friday.

The protests were part of a wave of demonstrations and work stoppages led by the hardline CGT union against government plans to reform labor law to make hiring and firing easier and help lower the jobless rate from 10 percent.

Police removed blockades at some of the major incineration and rubbish collection depots around the capital but to little effect because workers inside the premises subsequently walked off work, the CGT said.

Despite signs that broader strike action is running out of steam, train services were disrupted for the eighth day running.

The SNCF state railway company said less than 10 percent of workers were on strike, considerably fewer than last week, with three out of four high-speed TGV trains running and six out of 10 slower inter-city connections.

Working to defuse the conflict, Prime Minister Manuel Valls told parliament the state could take over all or part of an SNCF debt of 50 billion euros ($57 billion), possibly hiving it off into a sinking fund to be paid down gradually.

The CGT was holding workplace meetings to decide whether to call off the rail strike.

As millions of foreign visitors and soccer fans prepared for the month-long tournament that kicks off on Friday evening, CGT activists also disrupted a pre-championship publicity event at Paris’s Gare du Nord train station.

About 200 protesters mobbed the station as a locomotive carrying the Euro soccer trophy arrived, a Reuters reporter at the scene said. Riot police protected the trophy.

Separately, the minister in charge of drafting the contested labor law, Myriam El Khomri, condemned a dawn protest outside her Paris home in which she said about 30 demonstrators yelled hostile statements through a megaphone.

Valls has refused to scrap the labor reform but, on top of the debt pledge, has agreed to protect existing rest and shift time quotas for workers in SNCF reorganization talks.

Pilots at Air France are also planning to strike over pay curbs from June 11 to 14.

“The (rail) strike is incomprehensible and the one planned by pilots is every bit as incomprehensible when France is about to start the Euros,” Transport Minister Alain Vidalies said.

(Additional reporting by Lucien Libert and Emmanuel Jarry; Editing by Paul Taylor)

France hit by rail strike, demo by weary police

A police car burns during a demonstration against police violence and against French labour law reform in Paris

By Brian Love

PARIS (Reuters) – Strikes by French railway and port workers halved train services and prompted cancellation of ferry links to Britain on Wednesday as labor unions sought to force President Francois Hollande’s government into retreat on labor law reforms.

After weeks of protests in which hundreds of their number have been hurt, police held a rally of their own to vent frustration over the stresses of near daily clashes with violent youths on the fringes of the anti-reform movement.

As they did so, a crowd chanting “police everywhere, justice nowhere” surrounded a police patrol car, which went up in flames after the police officers inside fled the scene, a few hundred meters from where their colleagues were rallying.

The public prosecutor’s office said after the incident it was opening an inquiry into attempted homicide.

Wednesday’s rail strikes, set to run until Friday morning, reduced high-speed and inter-city services by 40 to 50 percent, also heavily disrupting local and suburban commuter lines, the SNCF state railway company said.

Strike turnout, the SNCF said, was about 15 percent, lower than in previous stoppages.

Brittany Ferries announced mass cancellations of connections between Britain and northern France, where port workers joined the industrial action.

Truckers maintained blockades set up on Tuesday in a bid to strangle deliveries in and out of fuel and food distribution depots.

At issue is one of Hollande’s flagship reforms a year from a presidential election – law changes designed to make it easier for employers to hire and fire staff and to opt out of cumbersome national rules in favor of in-house accords on pay.

Hollande says the change will encourage firms to recruit and combat an unemployment rate that has remained above 10 percent.

The 61-year-old leader has said he will not consider running for re-election if he fails to make inroads against joblessness. Critics say the reform will totally undermine the standards of protection enshrined for decades in national labor law.

“ANTI-COP HATRED”

The plan, which pollsters say is opposed by three in four French people, has provoked weeks of often violent protests.

It has also increased pressure on police who were already stretched by extra duties following last November’s deadly militant Islamist attacks on France and are also gearing up for the Euro 2016 soccer tournament that kicks off on June 10.

Condemning what it described as mounting “anti-cop hatred”, the Alliance police union called for Wednesday’s rally in the Place de la Republique, a central Paris square that has seen regular skirmishes in past weeks between riot police and youths hurling petrol bombs and paving stones.

Paris police chief Michel Cadot banned a counter-protest by a group that accuses the police of brutality.

Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve defended the police and said 350 of them had been injured in standoffs that had produced 1,300 arrests in just two months.

Further strikes and protests are planned for the rest of the week in what labor unions, along with a youth protest movement called Nuit Debout or Night Rising, hope will prove a big enough show of force to make Hollande reconsider.

(Additional reporting by Gerard Bon; Editing by Andrew Callus and Gareth Jones)

Strike jumps oil prices more than 3 percent

Kuwaiti oil sector employees sit in a shaded area on the first day of an official strike called by the Oil and Petrochemical Industries Workers Union over public sector pay reforms, in Ahmadi

By Devika Krishna Kumar

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Oil prices jumped more than 3 percent on Tuesday after a strike by workers in Kuwait nearly halved the OPEC member’s crude production, overshadowing bearish sentiment after Sunday’s failure by producers to agree to freeze output levels.

Thousands of Kuwaiti oil workers downed tools for a third day on Tuesday to protest against planned public sector pay reform, cutting crude output to 1.5 million barrels per day (bpd), according to an oil spokesman cited by news agency KUNA.

That is little more than half of Kuwait’s average output of 2.8 million bpd in March.

Reports of power outages leading to output declines of about 200,000 bpd in Venezuela and a pipeline fire in Nigeria that may have cut production by 400,000 bpd, along with the upcoming refinery maintenance season boosted the rebalancing of market and was supporting prices, traders said.

“The Kuwait strike in particular is a major factor. It was a bolt out of the blue in terms of how much oil came off the market so quickly,” said John Kilduff, partner at Again Capital, a New York energy hedge fund.

“Usually these things have a ramp down period but this seems to be able to flick a switch…It’s supportive for the market for now”

Brent crude futures <LCOc1>, the global benchmark, traded at up $1.29 at $44.20 a barrel by 11:20 a.m. EST. U.S. crude futures <CLc1> rose $1.47 to $41.25 a barrel.

The rally was catalyzed by the S&P 500 index <.SPX> crossing a key level that triggered buying in oil and across commodities.

Analysts, however, said Kuwait’s disruption would likely be brief and investors would soon focus back on the market’s oversupply given the failure of major exporters on Sunday to agree to freeze output to avoid worsening the glut.

“In the coming days oil production is likely to partially recover from its initial drop as non-striking staff are redistributed and inventories drawn upon, avoiding a force majeure on loadings,” policy risk consultancy Eurasia Group said.

A deal to freeze oil output by OPEC and non-OPEC producers fell apart at the weekend meeting in Doha after Saudi Arabia demanded Iran join in despite calls on Riyadh to save the agreement and help prop up crude prices.

Iran has repeatedly said it would prioritize regaining pre-sanctions crude output levels over discussing an output freeze.

Tehran’s crude oil exports have risen to around 1.75 million bpd so far in April, according to an industry source and shipping data. Exports averaged about 1.6 million bpd in March

Other exporters who participated in the failed Doha talks have already shifted attention back to their own interests. Russia and Venezuela have indicated they hope to increase output this year.

(Additional reporting by Karolin Schaps in London and Henning Gloystein in Singapore; Editing by Marguerita Choy)

40,000 Verizon Workers on Strike

Verizon workers take part in a rally as they negotiate a union contract in New York

(Reuters) – Tens of thousands of Verizon Communications Inc. workers walked off the job on Wednesday in one of the largest U.S. strikes in recent years after contract talks hit an impasse.

The strike could affect service in Verizon’s Fios Internet, telephone and TV services businesses across several U.S. East Coast states, including New York, Massachusetts and Virginia.

The strike was called by the Communications Workers of America and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers that jointly represent nearly 40,000 employees, such as customer services representatives and network technicians in Verizon’s traditional wireline phone operations.

Workers protested at various Verizon locations along the East Coast. Verizon said it had trained thousands of non-union employees over the past year to ensure no disruption in services.

While the wireline unit represents Verizon’s legacy business, it generated about 29 percent of the company’s revenue in 2015 and less than 7 percent of operating income.

Verizon’s Fios TV and Internet service is no longer growing and the company has been scaling back its landline network as it has shifts to the bread-and-butter wireless business and new efforts in mobile video and advertising.

Verizon and the unions have been talking since last June over the company’s plans to cut healthcare and pension-related benefits over a three-year period.

The workers have been without a contract since its agreement expired in August. Issues include healthcare, offshoring call center jobs, work rules and pensions.

“It’s regrettable that union leaders have called a strike, a move that hurts all of our employees,” Marc Reed, Verizon’s chief administrative officer, said in a statement on Wednesday. “Since last June, we’ve worked diligently to try and reach agreements that would be good for our employees, good for our customers and make the wireline business more successful now and in the future.”

The last contract negotiations in 2011 also led to a strike. A new contract was reached after two weeks.

On Tuesday, Verizon said it has been approached by the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service. In the last round, the FMCS mediated their contract dispute.

“The question of federal mediation is a distraction to the real problem: Verizon’s corporate greed,” the unions said in a statement, adding it has not yet contacted the FMCS.

Verizon’s shares dipped 0.1 percent at $51.88.

(Reporting by Malathi Nayak and Rishika Sadam; Editing by Saumyadeb Chakrabarty; and Jeffrey Benkoe)

Nigerian Teachers Strike, Rally For Kidnapped Girls

The unrest among the Nigerian people regarding the government’s inability to rescue 300 kidnapped girls from the Islamic terrorist group Boko Haram is starting to have nationwide impact.

The National Union of Teachers announced their members will not show up to teach as a general strike against the government’s failure to rescue the Christian girls kidnapped from a school April 14th.

“All schools nationwide shall be closed as the day will be our day of protest against the abduction of the Chibok female students and the heartless murder of the 173 teachers,” Union President Michael Olukoya told reporters.

The teachers say that the kidnapping of the girls and the government’s apparent weakness in stopping the Islamic terror attacks on Christians puts all youth in the country in danger.

“Children’s lives are being threatened, kidnapping all over the place, stealing, maiming of life, that’s what we are saying should stop,” said teacher Ojo Veronica.

Nigerian citizens in the northern part of the country have now reportedly begin taking up arms and forming militias for the sole purpose of seeking the kidnapped girls.  One group attacked a Boko Haram encampment and killed 10 terrorists.

Al-Qaeda Master Bomb Maker Struck By Drone

Ibrahim al-Asiri, the master bomb maker for Al-Qaeda who is a major target for international intelligence groups, has possibly been wounded in one of last week’s U.S. drone strikes in Yemen.

NBC reported that American officials are feverishly trying to confirm reports that al-Asiri was inside a car targeted for carrying four members of the terrorist network. Two of the terrorists were killed and another wounded along with al-Asiri. Continue reading →