Striking miners hit Wall Street

Striking Canadian miners rallied at the New York Stock Exchange on Oct. 21. Travelling in vans for 14 hours, 30 members and staff of the United Steelworkers union came to confront Vale executives as they rang the bell at the Exchange. Vale is the second-largest mining company in the world.

Strikers rally outside New York Stock Exchange. Photo: Oscar Hernandez

The miners have been on strike for three months in Sudbury, Port Colborne and Voisey’s Bay, Canada, after Vale demanded deep wage cuts and challenged seniority provisions. Vale wants to eliminate the “nickel bonus,” a form of profit sharing the workers had under the previous owner.

The company, based in Brazil, has more than $22 billion in cash and made $13.2 billion (U.S. dollars) in profit in 2008. In Ontario, Canada, alone, Vale made $4.1 billion in profit from 2006-08. The union charges that Vale is using the global recession as an excuse to demand cuts from workers in dangerous jobs who produce all these profits. Vale executives got a 121 percent increase in pay in two years. Just six of these suits get $33 million a year. (www.fairdealnow.ca)

The miners and the Steelworkers union are taking this fight to unions around the globe. Demonstrations took place in Buenos Aires the same day as rallies were held in New York and Canada. The union is demanding that Vale pay Brazilian miners more, rather than reducing Canadian miners’ benefits. The union’s Vale campaign is staging actions throughout Europe with other union allies, wherever Vale has offices/operations or transports products.

Oscar Hernandez of Bakery Workers Local 50, a Stella D’Oro worker and one of the leaders of the struggle to stop that plant in the Bronx from closing, spoke at the rally and drew the connection between all the companies that are putting profits before workers. The miners all put on Boycott Stella D’Oro buttons. Stella D’Oro products are sold in Canada as well as in the U.S.

As they leafleted the crowd that gathered around them, the miners were pleased by the sympathetic response from workers in the Wall Street area. If the strike continues, the miners will return for a major rally on Wall Street in December. Despite the coming bitterly cold Ontario winter, these miners vowed to hold out “one day more” than Vale can.