Today's Stories

June 4, 2008

Gary Leupp
Iran and EFPs: Chronology of a Lie

Ralph Nader
Disenfranchised Youth

June 3, 2008

Paul Craig Roberts /
Lawrence M. Stratton
Legislating Tyranny

Mike Whitney
The Withering Economy

Steve Early
San Juan Showdown

Manuel Otero
Why Hillary Won Puerto Rico: the View from the Colony

George Bisharat
The Hope of a Victimized People

Nikolas Kozloff
Obama's VP Quandry

Dan Bacher
Death on the Salmon Highway

Website of the Day
Censoring Bill Knott?

June 2, 2008

Uri Avnery
The Olmert Scandal

Nikolas Kozloff
Obama's Latino Problem Getting Worse

Allan J. Lichtman
Revisionist History: Bush, Borah and Hitler

Malini Johar Schueller
The Color of Randomness: Returning to the US From Beirut Via Syria

Robert Weissman
What's Driving Skyrocketing Oil Prices?

Peter Morici
Bailing Out Wall Street

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
Don't Get Burned: How to Protect Yourself From Raytheon's Pain Gun

John Ross
Celebrating Catholic Fanaticism in Mexico

Ahmad Al-Akhras
Encounters with the Watch List

Website of the Day
Man on Earth

May 31 / June 1, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
The Worst is Yet to Come

Jeffrey St. Clair
Arkansas Bloodsuckers

Gary Leupp
How McClellan Prettifies Bush

Stan Cox
Broken Agriculture

Rannie Amiri
Lebanon: the Domino That Wouldn't Fall

P. Sainath
A Guaranteed Day's Work--in the Fields, at 110 Degrees, for $2 a Day

Binoy Kampmark
Going Bankrupt in Vallejo

Robert Fantina
Bush, Rice and McClellan

Seth Sandronsky
Will There be Water Riots, as Sacramento Goes Dry?

Corporate Crime Reporter
Death Penalty for Bush?

Anthony DiMaggio
Gaming the Ghetto: Grand Theft Auto IV, Racist Media and the Concrete Jungle

Karl Grossman
A Half-Trillion for Nukes

Matt Reichel
From Vegas to the Heartland and Back Again

Paul Myron Hillier
Of Gas and God

Andy Worthington
Suicide at Guantánamo

David Yearsley
And the Winner is ... Wayne Shorter

Daniel Cassidy
Free Lunch

Charles Thomson
If Hitler Had Been a Hippy ...

Gary Corseri
A Dream Deferred: Activism and the Arts

Wajahat Ali
Sex and the City Through a Man's Eyes

Ron Jacobs
Robins Weep

Poets' Basement
McNeill and Davies

Website of the Day
Last Charge of the Light Horse

May 30, 2008

Bassam Aramin
Here's the Truth You've Been Running From

Andrew Cockburn
Petraeus' Iran Obsession

Saul Landau
How We Got Into This Mess

Nikolas Kozloff
Meet South America's New Secessionists

Robert Sandels
Turning Back the Clock on Cuba

Dave Lindorff
Talk is Cheap

Martha Rosenberg
Raiding Big Meat; Arresting the Wrong People

Harvey Wasserman
Lieberman & McCain: Linking Internet Censorship and Atomic Reactor Terror

Doug Giebel
A Plague on Both Your Houses (of Congress)

Shaun Harkin
The Trial of the Raytheon 9

Website of the Day
The Once and Future Environmental Movement

May 29, 2008

Jeffrey St. Clair
Bill Clinton and the Rich Women

Nikolas Kozloff
Puerto Rico, Obama and the Politics of Race

Col. Dan Smith
Deceiving the Dead

Karl Grossman
The Most Lucrative Incentive for Nuclear Power in the History of the United States

William S. Lind
Inside the Washington Game

Robert Weissman
What to do About the Price of Oil

Dave Lindorff
Why Puerto Rico Won't Matter

David Macaray
A Union Fable

Chris Genovali
Fear and Loathing in the Northern Rockies

Laura Carlsen
Mexico's Battle Over Oil

Website of the Day
Support Antiwar.com

May 28, 2008

Wajahat Ali
The Libertarian Dark Horse: An Exclusive Interview with Ron Paul

Ralph Nader
What's Really Driving the High Price of Oil?

Brian McKenna
Why I Want to Teach Anthropology at the Army War College

Corporate Crime Reporter
Why Vincent Bugliosi Wants to Prosecute George W. Bush for Murder

Brian Cloughley
The Attack on Damadola

Eric Walberg
Opium for the Masses from Afghanistan

Michael Dickinson
Raytheon's Pain Ray: Coming to a Protest Near You

Ijaz Khan
Opening Windows in Pakistan

Website of the Day
Older Than America

May 27, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
In Her Mind She's Killed Before: the Plot to Assassinate Ralph Nader

Greg Kafoury
Is Obama Turning (Further) Right?

Jean Bricmont
Western Delusions

Tim Wise
Farrakhan is not the Problem

Ricardo Alarcón
Puerto Rico's Turn

Stephen Soldz
APA Supports Psychologist Engagement in Bush Regime Interrogations

Andy Worthington
The Guantánamo 16

Alan Singer
Vapid, Stupid and Insulting: Chuck Schumer Speaks to the Graduates

Richard Neville
Storm in an A-Cup

Susie Day
Gone with the W

May 26, 2008

Uri Avnery
The Syrian Option

Bill Quigley
War Immemorial Day

Col. Dan Smith
Retreating from Hell: a Different Memorial Day

Cindy Sheehan
Why Memorial Day is a Double-Whammy for Me

Marjorie Cohn
Hillary's Assassination Politics: Her Last Shot?

Fred Gardner
Does the VA Care?

Raymond J. Lawrence
Pain Pays: Getting Rich at NY Presbyterian Hospital

Harvey Wasserman
Mugging the Election System

Moncia Benderman
Truth Matters

David Rovics
In Praise of Utah Phillips

Website of the Day
Fox News Jokes About "Knocking Off" Osama and Obama

May 24 / 25, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Death-Wish Hillary Primes Manchurian Candidate

Jeffrey St. Clair
Yellowstone: How Sununu Shrank the Ecosystem

Barbara Rose Johnston
Dam Legacies, Damned Futures

Nikolas Kozloff
U.S. Fourth Fleet in Venezuelan Waters

Adriana Kojeve
The Environment and the 2008 Elections

Robert Fantina
Justice Department's Revelations on Torture

Dave Lindorff
Bush's War on Children in Iraq

David Yearsley
The War on Kitsch

Nelson P. Valdés
The Buying of "Democracy" Agents in Cuba

Kathleen M. Barry
Celebrating Ethnic Cleansing

John Ross
Mexico's Narco Opera Reaches for High Point

Allison Kilkenny
Apathy Doesn't Live in Bronx

Fred Gardner
Orangeburg, 1968

Elizabeth Schulte
Can the Whole World be Fed?

Daniel Gross
Remembering the Wendy's Massacre: the Dangerous Side of Retail Work

Christopher Brauchli
The Search for a Token Right-winger

Richard Rhames
A Nation of Sheep

Daniel Cassidy
My Mother

Poets' Basement
Davies, Klipschutz and Willson

Website of the Weekend
Happy Birthday, Bob

May 23, 2008

Paul Craig Roberts
War Abroad, Poverty at Home

Alan Farago
The Radical Extremists of the Building Industry

Conn Hallinan
Ballots and Bullets: From Beirut to Bolivia

Mark Engler
The World After Bush

George Wuerthner
Cars and Cows: Living Large in America

Kamran Matin
The Kurds and American Neo-Imperialism

Sandy Boyer /
Shaun Harkin
The Long Incarceration of Pol Brennan

Robert Weitzel
A "Holey" Instrument of Peace in Iraq

Cindy Sheehan
An Uphill Battle

Liaquat Ali Khan
Pakistan's Futile Constitutional Amendment

Website of the Day
A Message from the Moral Compass of the McCain Campaign

May 22, 2008

Vijay Prashad
Racist Grammar

Joanne Mariner
A Military Commissions Cheat Sheet

Sharon Smith
60 Years of Apartheid

Jeff Birkenstein
Disaster Redux: Some Early Thoughts on the Earthquake in China

Brendan McQuade
From Obama to the PRTs in Iraq

Peter Morici
The Sorry State of the Banking Industry

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Restoration Boulevard

Dave Zirin
What I Want to Ask Mary Tillman

Ron Jacobs
CPR for the Antiwar Movement

Stephen Lendman
Immoral Hazard

Website of the Day
Hagee: God Sent Hitler to Drive the Jews to Israel

May 21, 2008

Jeffrey St. Clair
The Gothic Politics of Hillary Clinton

Nikolas Kozloff
U.S. Military Bases in South America

Alan Farago
Miami, Cuba and the Presidential Campaign

Dave Lindorff
Big John and the Scary, Scary Iran Threat

David Model
Genocide in Iraq?

Eric Walberg
Afghanistan: Who is the Enemy?

Franklin Lamb
Lebanon Gets a President

Kenneth Couesbouc
Tax Against Tyranny

Website of the Day
Child Labor and War-Affected Children: a Photo Essay

May 20, 2008

Ralph Nader
A Trip Inside Google

Uri Avnery
With Friends Like These

Patrick Irelan
The Empire and the Fleet

Ray McGovern
Come Out, Admiral Fallon, Wherever You Are

David Macaray
The UAW Strike Against American Axle

Chris Genovali
Big Oil on the Water: Skating Around the Tanker Issue

Ibrahim Fawal
Birmingham, Israel and the Nakba

Christopher Ketcham
Let Us Now Praise Famous Suicides

Andy Worthington
Guantánamo Trial Delayed

Martha Rosenberg
Merck is a Repeat Offender

Website of the Day
Defend the Students Who Pied Tom Friedman

May 19, 2008

Saul Landau
Cuba Will Live

Paul Craig Roberts
The Metamorphosis of the Conservative Movement

Brian McKenna
Brotherly Love in Philly's Badlands

Patrick Cockburn
City of the Dead: Mosul on Lockdown

B. R. Gowani
The Central Problem Pakistan Needs to Tackle

Dr. Trudy Bond
Psychologists and Torture: If Not Now, When?

Cindy Sheehan
Whose War is It?

John Mohawk
The Warriors Who Turned to Peace

Remi Kanazi
When Free Speech Doesn't Come for Free

Robert Day
I Get a Horse

Website of the Day
Evolve or Die

May 17 / 18, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
The View from the Crusaders' Castle

Tim Wise
Testosterone is Not to Blame: Why Sexism isn't the Reason for Hillary's Loss

Andy Worthington
Gitmo Trials: Betrayal, Backsliding and Boycotts

Robert Fantina
The Double-Talk Express Derails

Karim Makdisi
In the Wake of the Doha Truce

Harry Browne
Only Ireland Can Vote on EU's Future

John Ross
Suicide by Taco? The Demise of Mexico's PRD

Dave Lindorff
Fear at the Pump

Robert Weissman
Pharmaceutical Payola

Laray Polk
Bush Family Appeasement

David Yearsley
Puritans in Seattle

Ron Jacobs
Riot Squads, Privatization and the National Front

Paul Quinnett
My Last Flight

Sam Bahour
Refugees are the Key

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
Poverty Wages

Dr. Susan Block
The Groom May Kiss the Groom

Kim Nicolini
Paranoid Park: Inside the Fractured Landscape of Male Adolescence

Jeremy Scahill
John Cusack's War

Jeffrey St. Clair
Booked Up

Poets' Basement
Dominguez, Gerard and Davies

May 16, 2008

Stephen Soldz
Involuntary Drugging of Detainees

Jonathan Cook
Police Attack Al-Nakba March

Paul Craig Roberts
Lies of Aggression

Christopher Brauchli
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Pharmacy

James L. Secor
Olympic Torch China: the View from Shaoxing

Franklin Lamb
Did Hezbollah Thwart a Bush/Olmert Attack on Beirut?

Linn Washington, Jr.
The Price of Protecting Racist Cops

Dave Lindorff
What West Virginia Means

May 15, 2008

Stan Cox
Big Brother Close Up

Jeff Halper
Rethinking Israel After 60 Years

Greg Moses
Living for the Children of Palestine

John Ross
Why Mexican Justice is a Euphemism

Ron Jacobs
Go to Work, Go to Jail

Binoy Kampmark
Indian Jailbirds: the Case of Binayak Sen

Eve Spangler
We Should Not Celebrate Dispossession

Martha Rosenberg
Meat Wars with South Korea

Website of the Day
Idaho Wolf Killers

May 14, 2008

Ismael Hossein-Zadeh
Oil Wars

Reza Fiyouzat
Torture, a Bully's Creed

Felice Pace
California Water Politics: Of Dams and Water Buffaloes

Hamdan A. Yousuf / Dania S. Ahmed
A Generation Defined by War

Robert Weitzel
Hillary's "Final Solution" to the Persian Problem

Ralph Nader
You're Either with the American People or the Big Auto Bosses

Dave Lindorff
Hillary, McCain and the Stupid Vote

Missy Comley Beattie
White Heaven: Hillary's W. Virginia Idyll

Neve Gordon
Israel as a Site of Struggle

Dr. Susan Block
A Washington Witch Hanging

Website of the Day
Hillary's Downfall

May 13, 2008

David Rosen
Sexual Terrorism: the Sadistic Side of Bush's War on Terror

Alan Farago
Nuclear Florida: Beachfront Reactors in an Age of Rising Sea Levels?

Saul Landau
The Crisis at Home

Saree Makdisi
Forget the Two-State Solution

Paul Craig Roberts
How Empires Fall

Andy Worthington
Gitmo's Suicide Bomber

Brother Bede Vincent
The Problem with Rev. Wright--There are Too Few Like Him

Linda Mamoun
Marketing Ethnic Cleansing

David Macaray
The Myth That Won't Die

Website of the Day
Burning the Future: Coal in America

May 12, 2008

St. Clair / Frank
The Pentagon's Toxic Legacy

Ziga Vodovnik
Rebels Against Tyranny: an Interview with Howard Zinn on Anarchism

Gary Leupp
Why All of Our Efforts Won't Stop an Attack on Iran

Frankln Lamb
Choufeit's Bloody Pentacost

Suzanne Baroud
The Ambition of Hillary Clinton

Martha Rosenberg
Farmer Ernie's Chamber of Horrors

Dave Zirin
The Boss's Boycott

Carl Finamore
I Ain't Gonna Work No More

Peter Morici
Recession Watch

Richard Rhames
The Third Way to Nowhere

Website of the Day
The Untold Story of Black New Orleans

May 10 / 11, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Real Clear Numbers: 101,000 Casualties a Year

Franklin Lamb
Hezbollah Eases Up and Beirut Opens Its Shutters

Ciara Gilmartin
A Surge in Iraqi Detainees

Diane Farsetta
Inside a Nuclear Industry Soirée

Kent Paterson
Mother's Day in Ciudad Juarez

Alan Farago
The Social Engineers

Rannie Amiri
Beirut on the Brink

Patrick Irelan
Bolivia, Morales and the Red Ponchos

Robert Fantina
The Lexicon Legacy of George W. Bush

Nikolas Kozloff
El Salvador 2009: Another Feather in the Cap of Chavez?

George Ciccariello-Maher
The Yumare Massacre, 22 Years On

David Yearsley
Bacharach at 80

Ron Jacobs
Rosa Luxemburg's Shock Doctrine

John Holt
Can Yellowstone Survive?

David Michael Green
It's So Over

Ben Terrall
Dealing Sleep

Kim Nicolini
The Best Film of the Bush Era?

Jeffrey St. Clair
Booked Up

Poets' Basement
Gibbons, Orloski, Frisella, Gladstone-Gelman

May 9, 2008

Franklin Lamb
A Wild Day in Beirut

Andy Worthington
The Afghans of Gitmo

Benjamin Dangl
Polarizing Bolivia

Mark A. Huddle
Remembering Mildred Loving, an Unsung Hero of the Civil Rights Movement

David Macaray
Hollywood Gives SAG the Brush Off

Dave Lindorff
Team Clinton: Going Down Ugly

C.G. Estabrook
The Way We Live Now

Matt Kosko
McCain, Clinton, Obama and the Wages of Lesser-Evilism

Robert Weissman
Big Business is not the Solution to Global Poverty

Michael Dickinson
Jailing the Joint

Website of the Day
The Role of Third Parties in the U.S.A.

May 8, 2008

Sharon Smith
Rockefeller Family Fables

Saul Landau
The NATO Axiom

Laura Carlsen
A Primer on Plan Mexico

Binoy Kampmark
Food Riots are Coming to the U.S.

Kenneth Couesbouc
China's Paper Feet

Liaquat Ali Khan
Pakistan's Constitutional Shenanigans

Franklin Lamb
Blindsided, Hezbollah Mulls Its Response

Sen. Russ Feingold
Government in Secret

George Wuerthner
The Problems with Conservation Easements

Richard W. Behan
A Brief Exposé of a Fraudulent War

Adam Federman
Marching for Sean Bell

Website of the Day
State of the Air

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Strikes with Potenial Repercussions Across EU

Renault's Romanian Fairyland Suspended

By STÉPHANE LUÇON

The Bucharest press didn’t approve of the workers’ vote to strike at the Dacia car plant in March, nor its implications for industrial relations. “Doctor Union: the anti-investment cure” was the headline in the daily Jurnalul on  March 22; “Dacia and ArcelorMittal, strikes are at the limit of the law” was the headline in Cotidianul on  March 26; Evenimentul Zilei, the Ringier group daily, reckoned on March 27 that the strike at the Renault subsidiary could put up the Dacia Logan’s price by $78 to $125.

That reaction from Romanian journalists is symptomatic of a trauma still gripping the country following the dictatorship of Nicolae Ceausescu, and after the political manipulation of the miners’ strikes in 1990 and 1991. (Democratically elected but unable to stabilise the political situation after the fall of Nicolae Ceausescu, President Ion Iliescu approved the miners who, in June 1990, descended on Bucharest and ransacked the offices of local authorities and of opposition parties. In September 1991 Iliescu used a new march by the miners as an excuse to dispose of prime minister Petre Roman. Four died and over a hundred were injured in riots.)

During the transition years, the media described wage claims as a form of nostalgia for totalitarian communism, a pretext to treat activists as pariahs. Romania in transition was divided. Workers saw their jobs disappearing east via factory relocation; investors saw a land of gold where people worked happily for under $150 a month. But this economic and social scene has started to evolve. In the autumn of 2007, after weeks of negotiation, the unions concluded a deal with the neo-liberal prime minister, Calin Popescu-Tariceanu, to increase the monthly minimum wage from $167 to $214, despite monetarist criticism from President Trajan Basescu, the finance minister, the head of the national bank, and the press. And 2008 will be even more decisive for union action.

What changed was Romania’s accession on January 1,  2007 to the European Union. This, according to Petru Dandea, vice-president of Cartel Alfa, the union federation, created “price alignment around European market tariffs which worked through as steep rises in the cost of living. That’s what’s causing the current round of wage claims.” Just a few months after the minimum salary deal, strikes broke out at Dacia and ArcelorMittal. First they were criticized by all sides. The Atmosphere was tense.

The strike at the Dacia production line in Pitesti, home of the Logan, helps explain what happened. It had just begun when the plant’s management filed a complaint against the Union of Dacia Workers (UDW). On  April 9 a court at Arges judged the strike lawful, which didn’t prevent Renault’s group head of legal affairs taking advice on whether the decision breached Romanian law.

The unions still saw the court decision as an unexpected blessing. But then the strike at ArcelorMittal ((the Solidaritatea union called for a re-evaluation of salaries at the Galati plant even though almost 4,000 job losses had been announced by the factory management.)

 was suspended on April 15 after a decision by the court at Galati. Romanian law on the right to strike empowers individual judges: it stipulates that action “must not endanger people’s health or safety”. Factory managers hinted at industrial accident risks even when workers followed the correct safety procedures.

 “We can’t make precise accusations, but there is so much corruption within the Romanian justice system that it would hardly be surprising if a number of the orders suspending strike action were obtained in this way,” said Dandea. Romania’s accession to the EU had been threatened by a clause penalizing slowness in reform of the justice system, reactivated in the spring of 2007 after pressure from Brussels. The judgment of the Arges court, applauded by the unions, endorsed the whole trade union movement. Then, in an open letter to the workforce on  March 21, François Fourmont, Dacia’s chairman, warned employees that production of the Logan might, in the long term, be switched to Morocco or Ukraine.

Adrian Ursu, anchorman of a eurosceptical TV programme saw this threat “as a piece of bluff, or perhaps a gaffe, but in any case a badly judged initiative at a moment when the dispute might have been resolved”.

The workforce didn’t take the letter seriously. “It was ridiculous,” said Dandea. “Renault has invested over a billion euros in Romania and can’t leave just like that. Besides the write-down cost of the plant there would be heavy salary payoffs. Leaving Romania would prove far too expensive.”

Relocation is a credible threat for industry sectors like textiles, which rely on unskilled labor, but with Dacia it seems highly unlikely. Anyway, such a threat bonds otherwise disparate groups. Never in the history of Romanian labor struggles has a single union benefited in the way the UDW did from Fourmont’s letter: the post office union promised $17,160 to compensate for salary losses, the Universul federation came up with $3,440; in France CFDT-Renault collected almost $15,600 for the cause, while shop floor workers at Renault-Cléon collected more than $3,120. Cartel Alfa pledged solidarity, as did the federation of petroleum industry unions Petrom. Even the Social Democrats, whose ideology is extremely variable, as is their championship of privatisation and flirtation with the markets, pledged to support the movement, dragging the European Socialist Party in their wake.

A globalisation dream

In recent years Renault’s 1999 acquisition of Dacia has been described as a fairytale of globalisation. The story was of a major western industrial business arriving in Romania to bond with the workforce more closely than any local business had ever done.

Renault’s trouble-free reconstruction of Dacia was viewed as a textbook demonstration of management. This was partly the work of Bernard Brunhes Consultants, hired to manage the transition. The boast was that the unions had accepted a reduction in workforce from 27,000 to 16,000. Many commented that things had changed for the better since the arrival of the French.

The company’s human resources director, François Blanc, quoted Heraclitus: “Harmony is best born among those who differ”. Christian Estève, managing director at the time, congratulated himself for negotiating a start-up process phased over several years although Romanian law would have granted the necessary licences in two months. Among anticipated plus points were the establishment of a trust to nurture progress and mutual understanding, a staff retraining program and help with new businesses. Dacia wanted to be seen as a model privatisation of a former eastern bloc factory.

Success also brought exceptional commercial returns. Renault’s chairman, Carlos Ghosn, said this March that the operating margin on the Logan was the best throughout the group, 8 per cent  compared with an average 2 per cent. Fourmont announced record profits of $156m. Renault and Fourmont planned to increase production to 400,000 vehicles a year .

 But the workforce remembered  of unkept promises. Constantin Stroe, who had been the Romanian manager of Dacia since 1989 and stayed on after the Renault acquisition, had given assurances that under the new regime workers would earn a salary which met the needs of a family. By this year the workers were still waiting, while inflation rose because of oil and food prices.

To curb inflationary pressures industrialists and government emphasised a need for wage control, and this was echoed at the Ecofin (EU finance ministers) meeting in Ljubljana on  April 5. “It was unacceptable,” said Dandea. “Inflation is caused by factors which have nothing to do with the employees: the US financial crisis and the rising cost of food. I just don’t understand why Europe’s finance ministers seek to make workers pay for the bankers’ follies.” If, further west, “targeted” inflation has hit household finances, it has had a catastrophic impact on Romania. In 2007 the weekly food bill was 41 per cent  of the family budget , because, although the minimum salary in Romania is 10 times less than that in France, food often sells at much the same price.

The manager of a French business explains the wage claims as “a classic case of supply and demand”. Officially, Romania’s unemployment fell from 10.5 per cent in 2000 to 4.3 per cent in February 2008. The departure of two million Romanians to live abroad since 1990 has drained workforce reserves. In a market economy, the scarcer the commodity, the greater its value - and that applies in the workplace, to the pool of skilled labour for Ford, newly installed in Romania.

“We’ve yet to experience a wave of outward investment,” said journalist Adrian Ursu. “Nokia’s decision to swap the German town of Bochum for the Cluj-Napoca region, benefiting from the public grants available locally towards set-up costs, is much more representative of the Romanian situation than the Dacia strike.”

José Manuel Barroso, president of the European Commission, calls relocation from the heart of the EU a deadly disease, but that does not seem to reflect a strong European social policy. The columnist Ioana Lupea unusually enquired after the medium-term economic and social costs of Nokia’s possible eventual departure, which would provoke the same upsets in Cluj as in Bochum, where local people protested by destroying Nokia phones.

Some 85 of Dacia workers voted on April 9 to continue their strike, since they had been reinforced by the problems of relocation and the Arges court’s favourable judgment. They snubbed union leaders who thought acceptable the management offer of a further $128. On 10 April 5,000 people took to the streets of Pitesti and by 11 April the protest had secured an average increase of $154, 65% of the original demand. Work began next day.

Could the Dacia strike be a step forward in European social justice? We will know soon. European trades unions and leftwing parties will be monitoring conflicts for positive developments. On  May 6 there was a strike at the Leoni wiring factory, a Dacia supplier in Mioveni. On  May 9 workers at Silcotub, a subsidiary of the multinational Tenaris, struck at Zalau. On May 15 workers at ArcelorMittal Galati struck again after the legal cooling-off period ended. While the battle to save the factory at Gandrange (Lorraine) continues, will ArcelorMittal’s French and other EU workers support their Romanian colleagues and open the way for community-wide union negotiations.

Stephane Luçon is co-editor of the publication Working for EUR100, Seppia, Strasbourg, 2006. This article appears in the November edition of the excellent monthly Le Monde Diplomatique, whose English language edition can be found at mondediplo.com This full text appears by agreement with Le Monde Diplomatique. CounterPunch  features one or two articles from LMD every month.

Translated by Robert Waterhouse

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