High gas prices good for sugar workers

High oil and gasoline prices have led to higher world prices for sugar, and that is good news for Hawaii’s sugar industry and workers.

“11 years! One raise! Fair Contract NOW!” This chant sums up the injustice faced by the Pacific Beach Hotel workers who won an election to be represented by the ILWU over two years ago and are still struggling to get a fair contract with their employer—the HTH Corporation. HTH also owns King Kamehameha’s Kona Beach Resort on the Big Island and the Pagoda Hotel in Honolulu.

When the 200-room Kapalua Bay Hotel opened in 1978, it was a place local people called the “end of the road”, because that was where the paved road turned into a dirt road, which continued along the shore of the leeward coast of West Maui. There were no houses or developments beyond that point.

We have a chance this year to turn our country around because voters are discovering the truth about George W. Bush and his way of life and everything that they stand for.

Hawthorne Pacific members approved a new collective bargaining agreement in May and June 2006. The statewide agreement run two years and covers most of the production and clerical workers in units on Maui, Kauai, Hilo, Kona and Oahu.

Can you spare a few hours this week? 
The September 23 Primary Election is only a few weeks away and we need to elect candidates who will work in the best interest of working families.

ILWU Oahu members and retirees joined other unions and supporters of a mass transit system for Honolulu at a rally at City Hall on July 7, 2005. Much of the rally was directed at Governor Lingle who had threatened to veto a bill passed by the legislature that would fund the mass transit system.

SAN FRANCISCO—The ILWU’s International Executive Board, the union’s highest governing body between International Conventions, met in San Francisco March 30-April 1, 2005.

BASRA, IRAQ (6/29/05)—Originally organized under the British in the early 1920s, the Iraqi oil union has always been the heart of the country’s labor movement.

“Iraq’s two biggest strikes, in 1946 and 1952, were organized by oil workers,” Faleh Abood Umara, general secretary of the newly reorganized General Union of Oil Employees, told officers and members of the ILWU during a visit to the West Coast by himself and Hassan Juma’a Awad, the union’s president.

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in the door, its presence spread rapidly. Within weeks, it had taken over the financial functions of Basra’s civil administration. Workers, in order to get paid, had to take their time sheets to local KBR offices for approval. Those who had fled the advancing troops had to get company permission to return to their jobs.