Thai Railway Workers Punished for Maintaining Safety Standards
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Tim Ryan of the AFL-CIO Solidarity Center recently visited Thailand and reports on that country’s railway union’s fight against efforts by management and business leaders to break the union.
Sawit Kaewvarn is general secretary of the State Railway Union of Thailand (SRUT) and the general secretary of the State Enterprises Workers’ Relations Confederation (SERC), the biggest and most powerful union confederation in Thailand. So even though he is the pre-eminent trade union leader in the country, he’s being attacked by the railways management and threatened with being fired.
Over the past year, SRUT, along with Thailand’s Supreme Court, have thwarted attacks on the union and stopped attempts to privatize the railways by politically connected business leaders.
Global Support Growing for Employee Free Choice
Since Friday, when we wrote about international union support for the Employee Free Choice Act, more letters backing this critical legislation have poured in from around the world.
In separate letters to United Steelworkers (USW) President Leo Gerard, leaders of unions in eight countries, along with an international union federation, have expressed solid support for the bill. The latest letters come from all corners of the world: Paraguay, Japan, Ghana, Argentina, Brazil, Indonesia, Thailand and Togo, the base of the 13-member International Federation of Chemical, Energy, Mine and General Workers’ Unions (ICEM).
Workers Around the World Back Employee Free Choice
Workers around the world understand the freedom to freely join a union is a human right and one of the key marks of a free society. That’s why the global union movement is solidly behind the Employee Free Choice Act.
The most recent examples of that strong support come from Thailand and Indonesia. In a letter to United Steelworkers (USW) President Leo Gerard, Saman Pronprachathum, general secretary of the Petroleum & Chemical Worker’s Federation of Thailand, says “a strong economy depends on workers [being] given the opportunity to join a trade union and to bargain collectively so that fair wages and social benefits are lifted for all in a society.”
