Members of the New Zealand Meat Workers Union at CMP ANZCO have been targeted by a particularly vicious form of union busting which is being practiced more and more in IUF sectors across the globe. It works like this: an employer proposes radical changes to terms and conditions in CBA negotiations, then goes through the motions of bargaining with the union while actually just biding time, then locks out the workers in an attempt to force a signature on an essentially non-negotiated agreement.

As new details emerge about the process of transfer of PepsiCo bottling operations in China to Tingyi, workers there found out about the devil in this detail. And that devil is evil enough to make workers take very courageous steps of protest. According to recent press reports, workers in three locations protested against the company's plan in what obviously is a coordinated action in a country that denies basic union rights - that is the right to independent unions -  to its citizens.

At the November 8 meeting of the Nestlé European Works Council in Geneva, Switzerland, representatives of twenty Nestlé unions from across Europe collectively called on the company to immediately halt attacks on trade union rights in Indonesia and in Pakistan. The unions insisted that Nestlé reinstate the dismissed trade union members in Indonesia and ensure their livelihoods and halt all harassment of trade unionists in Pakistan.

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Management at Nestle's giant Kabirwala dairy factory in Pakistan - a state-of-the art facility with a feudal industrial relations system - is criminalizing the union's fight for the rights of hundreds of contract workers at the plant.

Management at 3 Accor hotels in Canada - Novotel Mississauga, Novotel Ottawa and Novotel North York - continues to retaliate against union members and supporters by disciplining and sacking them. Despite fierce management opposition, workers at the hotels are committed to winning recognition and bargaining rights, supported by UNITE HERE.

The October 31 collapse into bankruptcy of MF Global, the US brokerage firm with investment bank appetites and ambition, was the eighth largest corporate bankruptcy in US history, behind Lehman Brothers, Enron and Washington Mutual but ahead of automaker Chrysler. As with any bankruptcy, clients are scrambling to recover their money, but large sums have gone missing.

On October 31, members of the IUF-affiliated SBNIP rallied against the mass dismissal of union members at the Panjang, Indonesia Nescafé factory, where the union has struggled for more than 5 years to affirm its right to collectively bargain the terms and conditions of Nestlé workers.

Companies and agencies are jointly profiting from an opportunistic clause in the EU's Directive on temporary agency work, whose transposition into national law in the UK in October is already having a negative impact, reports IUF affiliate Unite.