Labor & Employment Law

L.A. Unions Send Caravan of Food, Hope to Locked-Out Rio Tinto Miners

By Mike Hall

Several hundred Southern California union members rallied at a Dodger Stadium parking lot yesterday before sending off a caravan carrying more than $30,000 worth of food and other supplies for locked-out borax miners at Rio Tinto’s Boron, Calif., mine. The mine is about 90 miles northeast of Los Angeles.

The caravan was organized by the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor to support the nearly 600 members of International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) Local 30 who are fighting the international mining conglomerate’s move to outsource jobs, convert full-time jobs to part-time temporary work, slash retirement benefits and gut grievance protections and other workplace rules.

Last month the workers rejected the contract offer and Rio Tinto locked them out Jan. 31.

Locked-out miner Randy Laursen told the rally:

You know we got big corporations trying to push all the laborers out, make nothing….This is America. We all have a right to make a decent living.

ILWU spokesperson Craig Merrilees says the small high desert town of 2,000 is rallying around the workers.  

People here are tough and willing to see this through to the end. It’s not just about Rio Tinto but all the companies doing this to people across the country. In this little town, people are drawing the line. 

According to the ILWU, in 2009, Rio Tinto made nearly $5 billion in profits, despite a worldwide recession. The London-based company operates mines on five continents and has a long record of union-busting actions, according to the International Federation of Chemical, Energy, Mine and General Workers’ Union (ICEM).

In a letter to Rio Tinto’s CEO Tom Albanese condemning the Boron lockout, ICEM General Secretary Manfred Warda writes:

It has been a decade since Rio Tinto became the target of an ICEM global trade union campaign over your union-busting actions in the U.S., Australia and elsewhere….Rio Tinto has undertaken actions that are beyond reasonable disagreements that trade unions and employers may have. Your lockout and effort to starve workers into submission and bring in replacement workers to steal their jobs is reprehensible.

Full post as published by AFL-CIO NOW BLOG on February 25, 2010 (boomark / email).