English

Workers in Carrefour supermarkets around Poland are complaining about the introduction of a new element in the "organization of work": a large red circle found on the floors of markets where workers are supposed to stand to "discuss issues" with the management. Workers in one Lublin market were the first to expose that, among the reasons workers should stand on the circle is to get permission to go to the toilet.

Workers have pointed out the absurdity of the situation where they have to stand 5-10 minutes waiting for a manager to show up at the red circle and give them permission to use the toilet when it is faster just to take a break. People are complaining that the procedure is totally humiliating.

Failure to stand on the red circle also has its consequences: if an employee takes a break to go to the toilet without doing so, it is considered an "unjustified absence from work", which could even be the pretext for dismissal.

A facebook group was set up to support the workers and protest against the red circle. Various organizations, including ZSP (whose members are already sabotaging the circles), have called on people to send protests to Carrefour through its website. .

www.pracownik.net.pl

On Saturday July 3, about 1000 militants and sympathizers of the CNT took to the streets to protest against labour reform and cutbacks which the working class has had to endure over the last few months.

The demonstration started punctually down Atocha St. at 12:00 with comrades from Valencia, Granada, Córdoba, Salamanca, etc. The demonstration at times turned into a combative march, with its participants shouting "workers, if you don't fight, nobody listens" "union, action, self-management","workers, wake up, unemployment is at your doorstep" and other slogans criticizing labour reform.

The first strike in the IT sector in Turkey was called on Friday. The strike was called by Sosyal-İş union at the Ünibel company, which provides IT services to İzmir Metropolitan Municipality. Ünibel workers receive 30-35 percent less money than those who work in other municipal companies. Workers are thus demanding a 200 lira (100 euro) pay raise.

37 workers are currently on strike.

http://www.atilim.org/haberler/2010/07/12/ilk_bilisim_grevi_devam_ediyor...

A group of Ukrainian women have started a petition to grant amnesty to "illegals" living in Poland. The appeal comes at the time that the Ministry of the Interior is working on ammending the Act on Foreigners.

Although there were already amnesty periods twice in Poland after 1989, only 0.5% of "illegals" could use it because of strict requirements that nobody could fulfil such as having a work contract. In fact, there are no permanent work contracts with either "illegals" or even foreigners with work permits since even legal work permits are only for a fixed period - usually one or two years.

* We present the no. 16 issue (July 2010) of CUBA LIBERTARIA, edited by GALSIC (Grupo de Apoyo a los Libertarios y Sindicalistas Independientes en Cuba). You may obtain a .pdf file of this edition in Spanish at cubalibertaria@gmail.com

It can not be denied that there are meaningful changes taking place in Cuba, though they are few, slow and hard to implement. But they are “changes” nevertheless, that unlike in the past, don’t seem to be the result of simple concessions to external pressure but rather due to the imperatives of domestic needs.

Unions want to set new minimum wage in Poland to 1500 zloties brutto (366 euro) but the government does not want to go so high. The current minimum wage in Poland is 1317 zloties (322 euro). The minimum wage is 1053 zl (or 257 euro) in the first year of work.

The minimum wage in Poland is one of the lowest in the European Union and represents a significant divide between the old and new Europe. Bulgaria, Hungary, the Baltic States and Romania have lower minimum wages; Slovakia and Czech Republic are on a similar level. The level in these central European countries, which all have "strong" economies and even economic growth, is the same as in Turkey.

At 7AM Monday morning, a worker opening up the administrative office in the city of Pruszcz found Remigiusz Thiede dead in front of its doors. Thiede had been on hunger strike at the office and claimed he would stay their "until the end".

Thiede appeared on June 24, demanding, among other things, to get help to pay for medicine. He was demanding "decent living conditions" since, like many pensioners, his pension was grossly insufficient to pay for food, housing and medicine. Old people who need medicine are often unable to afford it. Thiede claimed that, since we was being killed, he might as well stay there and die so that those responsible could witness his tragedy.

4 July died Rafal Gorski at age 37. Rafal was well known anarchist activist. He was active in Anarchist Federation and laterly Workers Initiative and Committee Free Caucuses.

Rafal started activity in late 80s in anti-communist movement - KPN, Confederation of Independent Poland. Then he took part in ecological movement and others. Later he was an editor of A-Tak magazine. He wrote a few pamphlets ie about participatory democracy and Polish terrorists.

In recent years he had cancer and last months, after bad operation on spine, he was paralysed.

He will be buried in Krakow on funeral 8 July.

Since forming a union at Coca-Cola's bottling plant in the southern Pakistan city of Multan in June 2009, members have met with death threats, abduction, firings, extortion, forgery and fraud. Management's vicious response to the workers' fight for a union is a story drenched with violence, corruption, sleaze and escalating criminality.

Management's response to union organizing in Multan was immediately hostile. As the union prepared for its founding congress on June 19, 2009, management began a campaign of blackmail and extortion targeting the 36 sales and merchandizing officers (SMOs) at the plant identified as active union supporters. On June 8 all SMOs were ordered to sign stamped, blank legal documents (the type used for affidavits or confessions) and to hand over signed blank personal checks. Those who refused this clearly illegal order were ordered to stay in the plant and barred from their sales routes – resulting in lost sales commissions amounting to a third of their monthly income. For 20 days SMOs were harassed into handing over these checks illegally. Four who refused were ultimately dismissed, together with three "temporary" workers directly employed at the plant, all of them strong union supporters.

We send out this appeal to ask for your solidarity, and more specifically, for action and reaction in international solidarity to the act of state violence that has recently taken place in Poland, but which is of great relevance to all those living within Fortress Europe.

We are a collective of Warsaw residents- immigrants and non, alike- currently engaged in struggle against state organs of repression- the police in particular- responsible for brutally murdering Maxwell Itoya, a Pole of Nigerian origin on May 23, 2010. This fight is manifesting itself on many fronts, from the legal to the subversive; we are agitating in the courts, the media and the streets. Our aim is to bring to justice the guilty police criminal, as well as the perverted racist system that has not only been shielding this bastard under a veil of “objective” lies, but that has also been using the same bogus arguments to justify its atrocious criminalization and downright slaughter of the thousands of immigrants who try to traverse the barbed gates of Europe.

Starting July 1, the Rydygier hospital in Krakow is to become the first fully commericalized hospital in the Malopolska Vojevodship. Even though this is to happen in only a few days, workers at the hospital have no idea what their working conditions will be in this new commerical entity - or whether they will be hired at all. In addition to these problems, there are shadows of corruption related to a tender won by the former vice-director and in general, there is a scandalous mess related to lack of information.

The management of the new entity will now be responsible for hiring doctors and nurses. However the workers cannot find out whether they will be offered work contracts, "management contracts" [sic] or whether they will have to register their own business activity. (In other hospitals, common workers have had to sign management contracts, despite the fact they are not managers, so that the hospitals don't have to pay overtime. In many places medical staff are also required to set up their own businesses and conclude commercial contracts with the hospitals for their labour.) The management of the hospital does not want to meet with the workers.

Authorities at the Voivodship, which is responsible for health care and promised to keep workers informed about the course of the commercialization of the hospital, also have nothing to say. They had promised to form a special committee to negotiate work conditions and a social package by September of last year, but nothing was done. Unionists have been trying to get a meeting with the Voivodship for months but have been blown off. Finally they managed yesterday, only to be told that nobody knows anything.

Activists of the Polish Labour Party are being charged with forging signatures to register candidates in last year's elections to the European Parliament.

"Police from Katowice have finished their investigation in this matter and the case has been sent to the court. On the registration lists you had duplicate signatures, often the ID numbers did not match the gender of the person who signed and there were also dead people on the lists" writes one of the main news services, Wirtualna Polska.

A former member of the Labour Party (PPP) already revealed on the internet how signatures are gathered:

"There are lists from all the previous elections in the office. There are also lists with signatures for a referendum about the anti-missile shield in Poland which were never submitted to the Sejm. In accordance with the Act on Personal Data Protection, these lists should be destroyed. But why should they? They are an invaluable source of address and ID numbers.

When the next elections come, they go to the cabinets and get the old lists. I have done this myself. people sit in the offices and rewrite these lists. They are even given different pens to do it with. As a rule, one person only fills in some lines, not in a row, and then the list is handed on to others, so that there is less chance that similar handwriting will be noticed. So that at first glance the list looks real."

They can be beaten with impunity, they can be frightened and robbed. They can work for a dirt cheap, they can be raped and abused. Illegal don’t go to report for police. The law do not protect illegal. The law hunts them, catches them and deports them. From every bad things, illegal is afraid of police and city guards the most. Even the ticket man in the tram is a representative of terror authority. Illegal risks his life running away from control. Illegal does not have documents, because they can point the place of deportation. Illegal is distrustful. Everything what he says might be used against him.

Polish police shot a Nigerian. It happened on Sunday, 23rd of May in Warsaw, by the Stadium market. Nigerian trader sold illegal goods. Police was fighting against economic crimes.

Nobody warned them. Police came in civil clothes. An African man start to run away. An officer caught him, push on the ground, started to put the handcuffs. The friend of African man came to them. He was protesting. Officer shot. The bullet reach the hip part, the bleeding could not be stopped. Nigerian man died.

The management of FIAT in Tychy are trying to get the unions to agree to even worse working conditions. The company is trying to make use of the "Anti-Crisis Act" to change, among other things, work schedules.

The Anti-Crisis Act was enacted in Poland last year and was meant to "save" companies which were seeing a decrease in turnover by allowing them to change work conditions. Under the Act, firms which were negatively effected by the crisis would be allowed, among other things, to force workers to accept more flexible work schedules. In practice this could mean that they could have to work 4 hours per day in times when demand fell, but 12 hours a day, without overtime, at other times. This can also be achieved by applying a 12-month accounting period for calculating overtime; the government enacted legislation allowing firms to do this last year.

Black Red White is the largest furniture producer / importer in Poland, with a 20% share of the Polish furniture market. There are 20 subsidiary companies in Black Red White and 9 additional companies registered abroad in Ukraine, Belarus, Slovakia, Russia and Bosnia and Hercegovina. Its products are sold in over 50 countries and the company employs over 14,500 workers.

The following article, about a labour conflict in Belarus, was published on the site of the Russian section of the IWA, KRAS.

The conflict between the workers of Shop №5 and management have made the pages of the "Brest Newspaper". A group of workers sent in a complaining letter to the editors of the paper, describing the history of the conflict. The people who wrote this letter have already resigned because the company's lack of action concerning their demands and because of the harrassment they suffered from the shop management. On April 30, "Brest Newspaper" published the article "A black stain on Black Red White". In response to this, we received the article "Black Red White - a branch of Belarussian reality" which was published on the site of the Russian section of the IWA (http://aitrus.info/node/796): it was read by journalists, workers and even the deeply nervous management.