Daily controls by the Federation to verify protocol compliance

On July 1st, the IUF’s Meat Industry Division held a teleconference with the participation of some 40 union leaders from the sector. Alberto Fantini, secretary general of Argentina’s Labor Federation of Meat and Meat Byproduct Industry Workers, reported on the situation in the sector and the COVID-19 pandemic. Below are the key points of his presentation.

Nestlé breaches collective bargaining agreement and lays off a worker in the middle of the pandemic

Carlos Velastegui, general secretary of the Labor Committee of Nestlé Ecuador Workers, an IUF affiliate, spoke with La Rel about the irresponsible way the transnational corporation has behaved in that country, where it has been negligent in the application of safety protocols and has further failed to comply with the collective bargaining agreement in the midst of an unprecedented global crisis.

Corporate health above public health

The Labor Prosecutor’s Office, the IUF, and our affiliate organizations CNTA and CONTAC (Brazil’s national confederations of food and related industry workers) are conducting a signature-gathering campaign for a petition to block the proposed amendment to Provisional Measure 927.

“They plan to solve the problem with more neoliberalism”

Honduras is a nationwide living experiment for testing out political, social, and economic trends that are later transplanted to other latitudes. The 2009 coup d’état heralded similar situations that would soon spread across Latin America. Labor reform, the invasion of paid-by-the-hour and intermittent work, political assassinations disguised as crimes of passion, criminalization and judicialization of popular struggles, a new penal code, the application of novel union-busting tactics, and institutionalized and unpunished corruption. Of that pandemic, Honduras is the hotspot.

Pandemic fodder

The health situation in Brazil under the COVID-19 pandemic is a faithful reflection of the institutional mess and the irresponsibility of a government that mocks its people on a daily basis.