JULY/AUGUST 1996 · VOLUME 17 · NUMBERS 7 & 8
B E H I N D T H E L I N E S
JULY/AUGUST 1996 · VOLUME 17 · NUMBERS 7 & 8
B E H I N D T H E L I N E S
IN WHAT THEY LABELED A VICTORIOUS END to a five-month lockout, 1,200 workers at the Charleston, Illinois-based Trailmobile Corporation voted on July 1 to approve a three-year contract with the trailer manufacturer.
The workers, members of the United Paperworkers International Union (UPIU), had earlier voted down a Trailmobile contract offer which would have extended a four-year wage freeze agreed to in 1992.
In the new contract, the workers won hourly wage hikes of 18 cents in the first year, and 20 cents in each of the second and third years.
The Trailmobile conflict had been a particularly bitter dispute. Workers responded to the company's hardline bargaining posture and lockout with an aggressive corporate campaign that focused on the connections of the company's owners, the Gemala brothers of Indonesia, with Indonesian repression in East Timor and domestically [see "Indonesian Crackdown -- in Illinois," Multinational Monitor, June 1996].
The UPIU campaign garnered support in the United States from the East Timor Action Network, and substantial expressions of solidarity from abroad. Workers in Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the United Kingdom, all countries where the Gemala brothers' Gemala Group maintains operations, took action on behalf of the striking Trailmobile workers.
Prior to the final contract agreement, Trailmobile extended a contract offer that would have required the workers to apologize for their corporate campaign activities and their allegations that the Gemalas were linked to the Indonesian slaughter in East Timor, according to UPIU Local 7591 President Gary Collins. The final contract included no apology provision.
"The unity of Trailmobile workers in Charleston, coupled with the UPIU's strategic campaign against the company's owners, has proven that union workers can stand up to corporate tyrants and win," says Collins.
Trailmobile did not respond to requests for comment.
"Deplorable" Exxon
A FEDERAL JUDGE IN ALASKA accused Exxon in June of cutting a secret deal with Seattle seafood processors designed to avoid punitive damages in connection with the 1989 Valdez oil spill.
Under the 1991 arrangement, U.S. District Judge H. Russel Holland said, Exxon paid $ 70 million to settle seven seafood processors' oil-spill claims. In return for a relatively quick payment, the processors agreed to return to Exxon their share of any punitive damages that they might be awarded in later spill-related cases.
In a statement, Exxon called Holland's analysis "legally incorrect."
Describing Exxon's attempt to make secret deals as "pernicious and flagrant violations of public policy," Judge Holland suggested that Exxon Chair Lee Raymond misled the jury during his testimony in the civil trial.
Holland said that had the jury know of the secret agreement, it would have recommended even higher punitive damages than the $5 billion it imposed. He added that it was "probable" that some Exxon lawyers committed ethical breaches in connection with the matter that could lead to disbarment in Alaska.
"Exxon intended to share in the very punitive damages award which the jury deemed necessary to fulfill society's goal of punishment and deterrence," the judge ruled. He said Exxon had acted as a "Jekyll and Hyde" in the matter, "behaving laudably in public, and deplorably in private."
Holland threw out the secret agreement and ruled neither the seafood processors nor Exxon would share in the punitive damage award. He took no further punitive action against Exxon or its lawyers.
Yanomami Under Siege
ENCOURAGED BY the suspension of surveillance operations by Brazilian authorities, thousands of gold miners have again invaded the territory of the Yanomami people.
Since the reinvasion, which began in March 1996, indigenous tribes have been living in an atmosphere of terror and violence, say Brazilian environmental and indigenous rights activists.
During the past three months, gold miners have shot and killed three Yanomami people, according to Commissao Pro-Yanomami (CCPY), a Brazilian group active for environmental and indigenous peoples' rights.
Worse, CCPY says hundreds of Yanomami people have fallen victim to malaria since the gold miners began combing through their territory.
"The good results of our health program will be undermined if the invasion is allowed to continue," says Caludia Andujar of CCPY.
Activists say that 35 clandestine airstrips are now in operation in the Yanomami area, and that at least 3,000 prospectors are already engaged in mining, contaminating rivers and destroying river banks and forests.
The Yanomami supporters fear that neighboring Venezuela will soon expel several thousand more Brazilian gold miners who crossed the border as the result of earlier operations by the Brazilian authorities to protect the Yanomami. These miners' return would further worsen a rapidly deteriorating situation.
"For the Yanomami, it is a matter of life and death. For the Brazilian government, it would be a matter of honor," said Andujar in a recent appeal to Brazilian President Fernando Henrique Cardoso to order action against the gold miners' illegal occupation of Yanomami land.
-- Haider Rizvi and Robert Weissman