Solidarity with Antwerp!

This is the first step to joint actions of all Delta-plants in their solidarity support for Antwerp. As you can see below in the 3 news articles below, there will be demonstrations of European wide solidarity. Antwerp workers will not be deseted. With each plant walkout there will be a stronger message sent that European workers are willing to act jointly and that the workforce of every European plant stands behind massive industrial actions to defeat the GM plan to desert Europe.

NEWS ARTICLE 1
April 26, 2007, 9:18AM
Belgium: GM Plant Workers Strike


© 2007 The Associated Press

BRUSSELS, Belgium — Workers at the General Motors Opel plant in Antwerp went on strike Thursday to protest plans to lay off 1,400 workers under the company's restructuring plan.

The plant, which currently employs 5,100 people, is facing a phaseout of production of the Astra model under plans announced by GM earlier this month. The next generation of the Astra will be built at plants in Germany, Sweden, Poland and Britain.

The company said it would like to shift Antwerp's production to building 80,000 Chevrolet model cars, and possibly the production of another unspecified 60,000 cars of another model.

Unions, however, said they would demand higher production quotas to save jobs at the plant, which currently makes 220,000 cars annually.

They vowed to continue their strike until next Thursday when GM's European management visits the plant to discuss the restructuring.

"People have started to count (and) 80,000 is too little to save the factory," Rudi Kennes, from the socialist ABVV union told VRT Television.

The Belgian national and Flemish regional governments have lobbied hard in recent months to stave off a growing list of layoffs in the country's faltering car manufacturing sector.

Similar restructuring moves at Volkswagen's Brussels plant led to 3,500 jobs being cut there after the company decided to shift production of its Golf model to two German factories.
---

NEWS ARTICLE 2
IG Metall Calls Stoppages in Germany's Biggest State (Update2)

By Andreas Cremer and Rainer Buergin

April 26 (Bloomberg) -- IG Metall, Germany's biggest labor union, will hold limited strikes at companies including Siemens AG and DaimlerChrysler AG next week after talks with employers over a pay dispute ended in deadlock.

``Warning strikes are now the only response to get employers to wake up to reality,'' Detlef Wetzel, the union's regional head in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany's most populous state, said in an e-mailed statement. ``Only by means of massive warning strikes can a solution still be found.''

Employers in the western state, also home to steelmaker ThyssenKrupp AG and General Motors Corp's Adam Opel division, today refused to raise an offer of a 2.5 percent pay increase plus a one-off bonus. IG Metall wants 6.5 percent more pay for as many as 3.4 million workers nationwide, some 700,000 of whom are employed in North Rhine-Westphalia.

The European Central Bank, poised to raise interest rates to 4 percent from 3.75 percent in June, says excessive pay gains may fuel inflation. German chemical workers last month won a 4.3 percent raise including one-off payments while half a million construction staff negotiated 3.5 percent more pay.

IG Metall said workers at DaimlerChrysler in Dusseldorf, the state's regional capital, and Siemens in Duisburg will join the first wave of stoppages on April 30. The walkouts will then spread across the state, once the center of Germany's coal and steel industries, and involve between 80,000 and 100,000 staff, union spokesman Wolfgang Nettelstroth said by telephone.

Inadequate

The Frankfurt-based union has dismissed the employers' offer as inadequate, noting the pay of workers rose 3.2 percent last year while profits of public companies such as Siemens and DaimlerChrysler surged 30 percent amid Germany's fastest economic expansion since 2000.

Chancellor Angela Merkel's government yesterday raised its outlook for economic growth this year for the third time in six months to 2.3 percent from 1.7 percent. Consumer confidence rose more than expected, GfK AG said today. Business confidence rose in April to the second-highest level recorded since reunification in 1990, the Munich-based Ifo institute said yesterday.

``Employers want to deny workers a fair share in the excellent profits, that's a disgrace,'' Wetzel said by telephone.

Last year, IG Metall called out more than 700,000 workers across Germany over nearly four weeks before a salary accord was signed. The union is entitled to stage walkouts from April 29 when a four-week legal ban on industrial action expires. To call full- blown strikes, IG Metall needs the approval of at least 75 percent of its members. The union may seek full industrial action unless employers improve their pay offer by mid-May, Nettelstroth said.

Fourth-Round Talks

A fourth set of talks in the union's biggest regional chapter in Baden-Wuerttemberg, affecting 800,000 workers at companies such as DaimlerChrysler, Porsche AG and Robert Bosch GmbH, started at 4 p.m. Today is ``the last chance to save companies from unrest,'' the union's chief negotiator, Joerg Hofmann, said in an e-mailed statement.

``The chance that these talks will break the deadlock aren't very high,'' Horst-Werner Maier-Hunke, president of the employers' association in North Rhine-Westphalia, said in a statement. ``The IG Metall's stubbornness means we're now confronted with unnecessary warning strikes.''

The protests will also disrupt production at Bayerische Motoren Werke AG's four plants in Bavaria from May 2 after the union and employers made no progress in talks on April 23, according to labor representatives.

Andreas Rees, chief economist for Germany at UniCredit's HVB unit in Munich, doesn't expect a protracted dispute.

The ``strike probability'' is no higher than 9 percent, Rees wrote in an analysis published April 17. The ``strength and breadth'' of Germany's economic advance may ultimately earn the union a pay package worth 4.75 percent, some 0.75 percent of which would come as one-off payment.

To contact the reporter on this story: Andreas Cremer in Berlin at acremer@bloomberg.net .

Last Updated: April 26, 2007 10:22 EDT
---

NEWS ARTILCE 3
GM's Antwerp Workers Strike
Caused by production reduction

Thursday, April 26, 2007
By . Agence France-Presse

Workers at General Motor's Opel site in Antwerp decided on April 26 to down tools for a week to protest job cuts at the site, a unions official said. The workers decided to strike after learning that General Motors intended to produce only 80,000 units per year at the northern Belgian plant from 2010 with production of Opel's compact Astra model to be shifted elsewhere.

"80,000, that's four or five months of work and then it's over," said Gino Cabras with the FGTB union, stressing that the plant currently produces 200,000 cars per year

"The factory's workers and administrative staff voted to go on strike until next Thursday" when GM Europe's management is due to meet at its headquarters in Germany, he added.

General Motors announced plans earlier this month to axe 1,400 jobs at its factory in Antwerp, as part of a shake-up of production for the next generation of the group's Astra model from 2010.

GM Europe currently employs 4,500 people at the site.

Copyright Agence France-Presse, 2007
---