Cartoon of the day

Special mention

 

Protest of the day

Hundreds of fast-food employees in Detroit walked off the job today, temporarily closing down a handful of restaurants as part of a growing U.S. worker movement that—as we’ve seen in recent months, in New York City and Chicago—is demanding higher wages.

Protest of the day

Tens of thousands of workers from Germany’s engineering, metalworking, and electrical industries have downed their tools in a series of rolling strikes during the past week in order to press for a better pay package.

Protest of the day

Thousands of miners remained on strike at two shafts in South Africa’s Marikana platinum mine on Tuesday, operator Lonmin Plc said, revising an earlier statement that they had gone back to work.

Disruptions at Marikana are particularly closely watched as it was the site where 34 striking miners were shot dead by police last August in South Africa’s deadliest security incident since the end of apartheid in 1994.

Workers affiliated to the militant Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (AMCU) refused to go underground on Tuesday, demanding the closure of the offices of a rival union, said the mining group. . .

Glaring income disparities and grinding poverty in the shantytowns around the platinum mines have also fueled the violence.

Protest of the day

Greek workers are planning to walk off the job tomorrow in a nationwide anti-austerity strike.

“The (strike) is our answer to the dead-end policies that have squeezed the life out of workers, impoverished society and plunged the economy into recession and crisis,” said the private sector union GSEE, which is organizing the walkout with its public sector sister union ADEDY.

“Our struggle will continue for as long as these policies are implemented,” it said.

Protest of the day

The United Food & Commercial Workers, the union representing some 40,000 Stop & Shop [ht: sm] workers, is preparing for a potential strike later this month. In response, the company, with more than 250 grocery stores in Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and New Hampshire, opened 14 recruitment sites across the region with the goal of hiring “replacement workers.”

Protest of the day

Actually, a follow-up to two different protests of the day. . .

Port operators along the East Coast have reached a tentative deal on a new contract with the union for longshoremen, averting a possible strike that would have crippled operations at 15 ports.

South Africa has increased the basic daily wage of farm workers by 52 percent following a strike in the wine-producing Western Cape region.

Protest of the day

Striking Greek subway workers trickled back to work today after the government threatened them with arrest, ending a nine-day walkout that paralyzed public transport in Athens.

Protest of the day

Contract negotiations with longshoremen across the nation have broken down in the past week. Federal mediators seeking to avoid a walkout of thousands of East Coast and Gulf Coast dockworkers, from Massachusetts to Texas, have called a meeting of them and shipping companies. Terminal owners in the Pacific Northwest are considering a lockout and have replacement workers standing by to ensure grain exports to Asia.

Protest of the day

Farmworkers [ht: sn] in the Western Cape have been engaged in a week-long strike, demanding higher wages. The South African police have killed one of the striking workers and wounded at least five others.