Workers confronted with union busting at Vale

[Judi Lynn]

Workers confronted with union busting at Vale
Workers at Vale Coal Colombia, an affiliate of the Brazilian mining giant, met with persecution after organizing in the Sintramienergética union. IMF has sent a formal letter of protest to Vale Colombia.

COLOMBIA: The workers of the transnational company Vale Coal Colombia, which produces coal at the El Hatillo mine in Calenturitas in the El Paso municipality in the Department of Cesar, have organized with the Sintramienergética union and immediately, on June 3 of this year, presented modest bargaining demands to this Brazilian company. The response has been outright persecution of the workers. The company says it will not negotiate because supposedly the union did not hold an assembly of all its members at the national level to approve the petition - something that the law does not require.

Several supervisors have threatened every one of the workers with dismissal if they do not renounce the union; during discussions on safety they state that they should not join the union because "unions don't end well and joining a union hurts the workers' families." On June 12, superintendent Jairo Tamayo locked Mario Prado in his office and accused him for being responsible for the firing of the workers at the Vale contractor Másering.

"We have also learned that most workers at El Hatillo are not directly employed by the company, but rather through the so-called "bolsas de trabajo," which appears to be a strategy for depriving workers of a wide range of rights," Jyrki Raina writes in his letter to the Vale Coal Colombia President Zenaldo Olivera.

http://www.imfmetal.org/index.cfm?c=26892&l=2