What follows is the content of an e-mail from James Ritchie, National Secretary of the NZDWU to Hector Ponce, General Secretary of ATILRA and Oscar Marozzi, Assistant General Secretary of ATILRA following the meeting of the informal leadership group of the dairy division of the IUF in NZ, 16-18 November 2011. Due to a series of problems with Argentinean airspace, the ATILRA delegation was unable to attend the meeting.

The 24-hour national strike called jointly by the Portuguese trade union confederations UGTP and CGTP halted public services and factories in many parts of Portugal on 24 November. Workers chanting "let the banks pay" marched against austerity measures imposed by the government as a condition of the EU/IMF bailout.

“They can take away the tarps and the tents. But they can’t slow down the Occupy Wall Street movement!”, said AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka after the first police raids on the protestors' camp. The union has called on workers, union and non-union, to respect the Occupy encampments as they would a picket line.

The US cereal and snack maker Kellogg's has announced it will invest USD 70 million in unspecified manufacturing improvements, and investors are howling with rage. Reuters reported on November 3 (Kellogg cuts outlook after cutting too many jobs) that the company "Cut too many jobs in recent years, which has led to problems -- including food safety issues -- that it must now spend heavily to fix, sending its shares down nearly 7 percent."

On November 22 the National Union of Workers announced that an agreement had been reached on favorable terms to the NUW members on strike at Baiada Poultry, Australia's largest poultry producer and the main supplier to retail giant Coles. The agreement brings equal pay rates for all workers at the factory, the key issue in the strike.

A capacity for aggression at Nestlé, the world's largest food company, is not limited to the aggressive pursuit of market share and aggressive cash flow management, qualities praised by investors and envied by competitors. It applies equally to industrial relations, where it receives considerably less attention. Violations of worker rights predictably make less headline noise than the latest quarterly results, a hefty dividend increase or the successful launch of a new product.

Basile Mahan Gahé, general secretary of the national trade union center Dignité (whose food and hotel section is affiliated to the IUF) was kidnapped from his Abidjan home on April 26, 2011 and held without charges. Amnesty International believes it has credible reports that he was tortured, particularly in the early days of his detention.

Members of the IUF-affiliated National Union of Workers (NUW) have been out on indefinite strike since November 9 at the Baiada Poultry plant in Laverton, Victoria. The key issue in the strike is the company's massive recourse to precarious labour and the refusal to pay comparable wages to non-permanent workers.