WIN (Workers Independent News) Week In Review April 6-8, 2007

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.laborradio.org/node/5655

WIN Week In Review April 6-8, 2007

By Doug Cunningham

The United Food and Commercial Workers has ended contract negotiations for some 59,000 workers at Safeway, Kroger and Albertson’s grocery chains in southern California. The union left the talks after learning of what is essentially a conspiracy to lock out UFCW members. The UFCW’s Jim Papian.

: “The announcement by the major supermarket chains in southern California that they had signed a mutual aid pact so that they could share financing and in the case that one supermarket were to go on strike , the other two would lock out UFCW members effectively ended bargaining negotiations."

---

Billionaire Kirk Kekorian is offering $4.5 billion cash to buy Chrysler. Daimler-Benz paid $36 billion for Chrysler in 1998. Kekorian’s group says it intends to build Chrysler by “partnering” with the UAW an Chrysler management. And by partnering Kerkorian apparently means the UAW working out a deal with Chrysler to take on the $22 billion in unfunded pension costs and health care for retirees.

---

Roughly 7,000 Northrop-Grumman workers at the Ingalls U.S. Navy shipyard in Mississippi voted to end their month-old strike over health care benefits and wages this week. Mike Crawley is President of the Pascalouga, Mississippi Metal Trades Council.

: “We stayed united throughout the time and over those factors. And we got the company to move in those things that we was talkin’ about – the health care and the money on the time card.”

---

The United Steelworkers union as reached an tentative contract agreement with Bridgestone/Firestone tire company. The USW says it follows the pattern set at B.F. Goodrich and Goodyear. Workers at Bridgestone/Firestone will vote by April 25th on whether or not to accept the agreement.

---

The Economic Policy Institute’s Rob Scott says U.S. global trade policies have seriously hurt workers and they need an overhaul.

: "We absolutely have to begin by incorporating labor and environmental standards in the core of trade agreements. And make them enforceable with tariffs. We also have to make investments to rebuild our manufacturing capacity, industries that have been devastated by this race to the bottom.”

---

The New Jersey Education Association’s Steve Baker says a vow by New Jersey's governor to make substantial pension contributions over the next several years to New Jersey’s underfunded state employees pension system is welcome news.

"It's a step in the right direction, but it's a major problem."

The NJEA wants to see a long-term, serious commitment properly fund state employee pensions in New Jersey.

---

The Association of Flight Attendants – CWA is appealing a court injunction against its right to strike Northwest Airlines. The court decided Northwest’s tossing out union contracts was not a breach of the contracts but an annulment and therefore Northwest could not a breach contracts that don’t exist. The union calls that a “unique approach to the law”.
Posted 04/07/2007 - 1:17pm


AUDIO version here: http://www.laborradio.org/files/lo/winsheadlines.ram