BY SEAN HEALY
The world's largest mining company, BHP Billiton, might be about to discover the limits of its power, after a global union representing 23 million metalworkers launched a worldwide campaign against its labour and environmental practices.
Meeting in Sydney for its world congress November 12-14, the International Metalworkers Federation resolved to target the multinational with a campaign which will include publicising the company's full record to its worldwide workforce, holding protest meetings and rallies and possibly even coordinated international strike action.
"This company cannot behave in a fashion where it is producing anti-union rhetoric across the world aimed at destroying unions", said the IMF's assistant general secretary Brian Friedrichs, announcing the campaign. "If there is one company that must be brought to book, it is this one."
The metalworkers' federation has said it will coordinate its campaign with the International Federation of Chemical, Energy and Mine and General Workers' Unions (ICEM), which covers BHP Billiton's mineworkers.
The final straw for global metalworkers' unions came in October when, after only several hours on strike, BHP Billiton sacked 700 metalworkers at its Mozal aluminium plant in Mozambique and used police and dogs to evict the workers from the premises.
The workers, members of the IMF-affiliated SINTIME, were seeking a new enterprise agreement, according to Stephen Nhlapo of the IMF's African regional office, including improved pay and working conditions, an end to a no-strike clause in their previous agreement and an end to practices the workers believe are racially discriminatory.
The company employs a number of white South African workers who are paid on average three times the local workers and receive a "malaria allowance" of US$500 a month which locals don't get.
While the Mozal workers' strike had been certified as legal by the regional commissioner, BHP Billion "colluded with the government", says Nhlapo, "and now [the government] won't intervene to protect the workers".
Since sacking the workers on October 3, the company has rehired many of them, but on individual contracts with a three-month probation period and with lesser conditions. Forty shop stewards and union representatives have not been rehired, however.
While the treatment of the Mozambican workers may have prompted the international union's campaign, a meeting of union representatives called to discuss the situation in BHP Billiton turned up "one horror story after another", according to Australian Manufacturing Workers Union national secretary Doug Cameron.
Among cases uncovered by the international federation were BHP Billiton workers in Peru working 12-hour shifts in a mine more than 4000 metres above sea level and whose health is being destroyed as a result.
The bad industrial relations record isn't confined to the Third World, either, according to union officials.
The company has been involved in a bitter and long-drawn-out dispute with unions in its operations in the Pilbara, in Western Australia, where it has attempted (so far unsuccessfully) to force its unionised workforce onto individual contracts.
The metalworkers federation said BHP Billiton's environmental record would also come under fire. The company's Ok Tedi mine, in Papua New Guinea, has been the subject of much controversy for over a decade, following widespread pollution of the Fly River from its tailings.
The federation has defended its threat of worldwide sympathy strikes, which in many countries including Australia are illegal, by asserting that unions should have the rights to operate globally just as companies do.
"If you have companies that can move finance and production across borders, we should be able to deal with them on the same basis", says Cameron.
A call to repeal laws prohibiting sympathy strikes is at the centre of the IMF's new Plan of Action, adopted by the congress, and is part of an attempt by unions to cope with multinational companies' increasingly globalised strategies.
Unions are well behind in their efforts, IMF officials readily admit, and have been caught out time and again by companies capable of quickly transferring production to get around national pro-labour laws or wage deals.
The sense of needing to catch up was palpable at the conference, which was dominated by discussion of globalisation and neo-liberalism and its impacts on working people.
The influence of the new anti-globalisation movement was also clear, with the IMF's Plan of Action including support for long-time social movement demands, such as cancellation of Third World debt and the introduction of a Tobin Tax to discourage financial speculation.
The congress passed a resolution condemning the US embargo against Cuba and one critical (although not unequivocally opposed) to the US "war on terrorism".
From Green Left Weekly, November 21, 2001.
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