Dozens hurt inPolish miners’ protest
Polish coal miners attacked police with sticks, burning boots and lumps of concrete on Thursday, Sept. 11 as a protest against planned job cuts and pit closures turned into one of the country’s worst riots in years.
Dozens of police and about 20 protesters were hurt after some of the 8,000 miners marching in central Warsaw, some of whom were masked, attacked riot police who responded with teargas, water cannon and rubber bullets.
“We have nothing to lose. If they sack us we have no place to go — and I have two kids and a wife to look after,” said Piotr Wesoly, 44, who has worked in a pit for 26 years.
The violence served as a stark reminder of the struggle Prime Minister Leszek Miller faces as he seeks to wean loss-making state industry off subsidies as required by the European Union, which Poland will join next year.
Miller’s left-wing government, which recently offered an unprecedented $4.6 billion to bail out the mining sector, said it was sticking by plans to close four of 23 mines run by the state coal holding company, Kompania Weglowa.
“These protests will not change our resolve to restructure the coal sector,” Deputy Economy Minister Irena Herbst told a news conference, which had to be rescheduled after miners laid siege to her department, smashing several windows. (Reuters)

Ranks of jobless pose challenge to Brazil’s Lula
In his campaign for the presidency, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva pledged to create 10 million jobs for Brazilians in four years.
Brazil’s ranks of unemployed have grown this year, presenting Lula with a challenge that, in part, will define his presidency.
The veteran leftist was elected with the support of many Brazilians who want to see social change in a country where flashy wealth and miserable poverty exist side by side.
The jobs plight was dramatized in Rio de Janeiro in June, when tens of thousands of applicants queued for days to fill 1,500 jobs as garbage collectors. The line stretched for five miles and police fired tear gas when fighting broke out.
The unemployment figures only hint at the scale of the issue. Armies of Brazilians work in the informal economy — in seasonal work on sugar plantations, scavenging for discarded cardboard or tins, or selling cheap items on the streets.
Many factories keep their workers off official books, to avoid paying the heavy taxes demanded of industry. (Reuters)

Senate to Bush: ‘Don’t mess with overtime’
In a major setback to President George W. Bush’s proposal to take overtime pay protections away from more than 8 million workers, the US Senate on Sept. 10 voted 54–45 to block the raid on workers’ paychecks.
The vote, which drew the support of six Republican senators, was on an amendment by Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) that prevents the US Department of Labor from implementing a Bush-backed proposal to gut overtime protections guaranteed under the Fair Labor Standards Act. The Harkin amendment was attached to the fiscal year 2004 Labor, Health and Human Services and Education appropriations bill (H.R. 2660).
The Senate had been expected to vote on the amendment Sept. 9, but Republican leaders maneuvered to delay the vote to a time when several Democratic senators who are campaigning for the presidency would be out of town and unable to vote. However, Harkin and the amendment’s supporters vowed to block action on the appropriations bill until the Senate voted on the overtime amendment.
After the Labor Department announced its plan to take away overtime pay in March, it received more than 80,000 comments by the close of the public comment period June 30 — and acknowledges most are against the proposal.
During the August congressional recess, activists from local unions, central labor councils and state federations distributed worksite fliers about the overtime attack, encouraged workers to contact their lawmakers and made lobbying visits to congressional district offices. That mobilization will intensify when the Senate resumes work.
A recent survey shows how far out of step Bush’s efforts to gut overtime pay are with the public.
Three in four Americans oppose the Bush administration’s proposal to eliminate several million employees’ right to overtime pay, and opposition is overwhelming regardless of political affiliation, race, income or geographic region, according to a new national survey conducted by the independent polling firm Peter D. Hart Research Associates. The survey was conducted among 862 adults from Aug. 26-31, 2003, and was commissioned by the AFL-CIO. (AFL-CIO)

As factory jobs disappear, workers have few options
In three years, Ohio has lost more than 160,000 factory jobs, representing one-sixth of its total. That is but a small fraction of the 2.7 million manufacturing jobs lost nationwide in those three years, many of them because of imports. Some economists say that even with a boom all those jobs are not likely to return.
Factory unemployment has snowballed into a huge social and political issue across the Midwest, after manufacturing in the region boomed in the 1990’s. President Bush gave a speech about manufacturing losses on Labor Day in Ohio, and the Democratic presidential candidates are pressing the issue.
A wide range of figures suggests that the economy is likely to surge, but economists predict unemployment will remain almost unchanged at nearly six percent through the 2004 presidential election.
Ask laid-off workers what is to blame for the woes, and they point to imports, low wages in China, the strong dollar, production moving overseas, President Bill Clinton for embracing the North American Free Trade Agreement and President Bush for focusing only recently on the crisis. (New York Times)