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Liberian Rubber Workers To Receive Meany-Kirkland Award |
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The courageous struggle for a better life by Liberian rubber workers has drawn support from working people around the world who recognize that an assault on one worker anywhere is an assault on workers everywhere. Yesterday, the AFL-CIO Executive Council, meeting in San Diego, voted to give the 2007 George Meany-Lane Kirkland Human Rights Award to the Firestone Agricultural Workers Union of Liberia (FAWUL).
The council also endorsed a campaign to highlight the inequalities faced by women workers, praised the peace accord in Kenya and honored a longtime U.S. civil and human rights champion.
The 2007 Meany-Kirkland Award, our union movement’s highest honor, recognizes the long struggle by more than 4,000 workers at a Firestone rubber plantation for an independent voice. For the first time in 82 years, the workers at the plantation in Harbel—named for the tire maker’s founder Harvey Firestone and, his wife, Idabelle—are now running their own union. In late December, the Liberian Supreme Court ruled the July election that threw out the officials of the longtime company-controlled union was a legitimate election.
Firestone management recognized the new union leadership after the Supreme Court decision, and negotiations for a new collective bargaining agreement have begun.
The workers joined together to improve pay and living and working conditions. Management routinely violates basic workers’ rights. Rubber tappers work 14 hours a day and must tap 750 rubber trees and accumulate 150 pounds of latex daily—all for little more than $3 a day and a monthly 100-pound bag of subsidized rice if quotas are met. Tappers walk for miles with more than 75 pounds of rubber in metal buckets on their backs, and the company fails to provide them with basic safety equipment.
Past recipients of the Meany-Kirkland Human Rights Award include such heroic figures as Wellington Chibebe, the leader of the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions; imprisoned Nigerian trade union leader Frank Kokori; Muchtar Pakpahan of the Indonesia Labor Welfare Union (SBSI); Han Dongfang, China’s independent worker-leader; Ela Bhatt, founder of India’s Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA); and most recently, the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) in honor of journalists around the world who were killed on the job.
The council also pointed out that some 1.2 billion working women—about 40 percent of total world employment—earn less than men for the same jobs, are more likely to be unemployed and poor and face violence and harassment in the workplace. Click here to read the statement, “International Women’s Day: ”Decent Work, Decent Life For Women.”
The council endorsed and joined the International Trade Union Confederation’s (ITUC’s) and Global Unions federation’s two-year “Global Campaign for Decent Work, Decent Life for Women.” The campaign kicks off March 8, the centenary of International Women’s Day, when 15,000 women marched through New York City demanding shorter working hours, better pay, voting rights and the end to child labor. The council emphasized the campaign is an important opportunity to strengthen gender equality both at work and in the union movement.
It advocates decent work for women and gender equality in labor policies and agreements. It seeks gender equality in trade union structures, policies and activities and significant increases in the number of women organized into unions and in elected positions.
The AFL-CIO already is taking part in the broader “Decent Work, Decent Life” campaign launched in 2007 sponsored by the ITUC, European Trade Union Confederation, Global Progressive Forum, Solidar and Social Alert International. The campaign aims to show decent work is fundamental to democracy. On Oct. 7, the World Day for Decent Work, the AFL-CIO union movement will highlight the necessity of passing the Employee Free Choice Act as critical to ensuring decent work in the United States. In other actions yesterday, the council:
- Welcomed the peace agreement between the government of Kenya’s President Mwai Kibaki and the opposition led by Raila Odinga. Disputed presidential elections created a political and social crisis, which led to the tragic deaths of nearly 1,500 Kenyan citizens and the displacement of more than 600,000 people. The council also cautioned that the accord “will soon be in jeopardy unless there is also a global commitment to seriously address and reverse the economic privation and hardship suffered by Kenya’s workers, along with full respect for fundamental labor standards, including the right to organize and collectively bargain.” Click here to read the statement.
- Passed a resolution honoring the late Rev. James Orange, who died Feb. 16. The council statement praised Orange, a one-time lieutenant of Martin Luther King Jr. and a longtime union organizer, as one of America’s “greatest warriors for social justice….”
For decades, he took part in nearly every major effort by southern working women and men to form unions and seek a voice in the workplace. We mourn the death of the Rev. James Orange, and we will honor him by taking up his song for freedom.
Read the statement “ The Rev. James Orange” by clicking here.
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