A campaign has started against the exploitation of workers in OTTO temporary agency. On February 11, ZSP and Priama Akcia organized informational actions and protests at the offices of OTTO in Poland and Slovakia. In Holland, a group of Polish workers, comrades from de Vrije Bond (AGA and ZAG) and the ZSP visited some workers “hotels”.

OTTO temporary agency is the biggest employer of workers from Poland, Slovakia and the Czech Republic in Holland. The salaries, lack of payment for sick leave or vacation and other working conditions, as well as the housing conditions, are sometimes ilelgal and do not comply with the collective agreement for temporary agencies. Moreover, OTTO create a system of labour control and earns money from a system of fines at work and at the company housing. We wrote more about the problems with the agency here: www.otto.zsp.net.pl

The general strike of all public and private professions, for the whole day, is called in particular against all laws and agreements between unions, Government and employers, present and past, that aim to limit freedom of strike, negotiation and representation, but also:

- against all laws, present and past, that aim to reduce workers' wages and to worsen their working conditions;

- against any attempt of charging only the workers for the consequences of the economical crisis, by rising retirement age and freezing wages in relation to inflation;

- for major pension and wage rises, free from productivity, and guaranteed income and services for all, recovering money from tax evasion and profits;

- for the end of spending on defence and of security and warmongering logics; the money saved by stopping these useless spending should be used to create new imployment;

- for the end of any kind of temporary employment and the hiring of all temporary workers and of those payed under the table with permanent contracts;

- to free the residence permit from the employment contract, for the withdrawal of the package of security legislation and to close the CIEs (former CPTs).

The USI – AIT National Secretary
Guido Barroero

The Vincci hotel chain fired our comrade Manuel Puente after seven years in the company while he was on sick leave due to an accident he suffered at work. The accident caused him a number of bodily injuries that will prevent him from working for several years.

The labor management of this hotel chain is known for its deliberate redundancies in recent months, the gradual downsizing of the staff, the repeated use of temporary agency workers at the expense of permanent employees and the systematic breach of the collective agreement for the hotel sector. But it is fundamentally characterized by increasing levels of exploitation towards the hotel workers, who are forced to overtime and performing functions other than the ones they should, and by all sorts of aggression against the most basic rights of the workers.

Therefore the CNT-AIT denounces the dismissal which happened in Granada, which is not isolated in the context of exploitation in the current employment situation.

No dismissal without a response!

Organize and struggle!

CNT-AIT Granada

http://www.vinccidespideyexplota.blogspot.com/

This is the first general strike in Portugal for the last 22 years and that alone should shed some light over the social situation in this country. In fact, social conflictuality in Portugal is quite low and the number of strikes has actually been falling for the past thirty years, despite the continuously worsening situation of the Portuguese working class. Unionization rates tend to fall as well, as the two large Portuguese party-run Trade Unions serve more to appease and stall conflicts than to fight exploitation and that hasn't gone unnoticed.

Portuguese society has gone trough considerable changes for the past half-century, going from a rapid industrialization starting in the 1960's, fueled mostly by the influx of foreign capital, from which a more combative and organized working-class would emerge, to an equally rapid de-industrialization, as cheaper sources of labor-force would be found in Eastern Europe and Asia. Portuguese economy nowadays is dominated by small, inefficient services companies, where workers have become more isolated from one another, have less traditions of struggle, are generally on precarious terms, and are paid those miserable wages that make possible for such companies to survive. The whole system has been in an acute state of crisis for the past 10 years and workers have been its first victims.