Miners striking against Codelco, Chile's state owned mining corporation are celebrating a victory. After a solid 37 day strike by some 13,000 workers the company made a revised offer. The strikers, subcontractors in the CTC union federation, voted by a large majority to accept the offer and end the strike.
The kidnap of 23 South Korean missionaries in Afghanistan is a tragedy, but the events can only be understood in the context of the deployment of South Korean troops to aid the US/Nato occupation.
Last Sunday’s elections to the upper house of the Japanese parliament were a huge defeat for the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and the right wing prime minister Shinzo Abe. Elections were held for 121 seats – half of the upper house. The LDP only won 37 seats, while the main opposition Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) gained a majority with 60 seats.
A four-hour strike by Germany’s train drivers at the beginning of July brought large parts of the country’s rail traffic to a standstill. Now the drivers are set for an all-out strike which could cause major disruption to traffic and corporate logistics.
The "socialist battalions" of Venezuela’s new political party met last week in open assembly in various districts of the capital Caracas. This is to be repeated across Venezuela.
The Justice and Development Party (AKP) was re-elected on Sunday of last week with a thumping majority in the Turkish elections.
Egyptian postal workers occupied the Egyptian Postal Service building in the capital Cairo last week.
The US wants to get it hands on Iraq’s oil wealth and is pressuring the Iraqi government to pass a law that will mortgage the country’s future, says Hassan Jumaa Awad, the leader of the Iraqi Federation of Oil Unions.
This week some 700 miners have come out on strike in Chile’s Collahuasi copper mine, nearly 2,000 kilometres north of Santiago and 5,000 metres up in the Andes. This is at a time when thousands of subcontracted workers in Chile’s state owned copper mines are already out.
What is the payoff for being a loyal partner in George Bush’s "war on terror"? For Pakistan’s dictator General Musharraf, it means being granted the means to propagate terror yourself.
Mansour Osanloo, the President of the Syndicate of Workers of the Tehran and Suburbs Bus Company (Sherkat-e Vahed) was kidnapped on 10 July in Tehran, Iran by unknown assailants.
The use of sub-contractors has become endemic in Chilean copper mines. In 1980 the state copper company Codelco employed 28,000 workers on fixed contracts. Now only 18,000 work "direct", and 33,300 work for sub-contractors – and the jobs which are "tendered out" are the same jobs that direct workers do.
