Drummond Coal
in Colombia Put Pressure on Drummond
- Contact its Customers!
For More Information
Background Article from the
Birmingham Business Journal
Background Article from the
Wall Street Journal
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Put Pressure on Drummond
by Contacting Drummond Customers
A Drummond Watch Action Alert
from http://www.voice4change.org (04/16/04)
Negotiations are underway between the union and Drummond Company.
Despite the enormous profits that Drummond derives from its Colombia
operations, the company has not accepted
any of the workers' requests as presented in their petition. Rather
than negotiating in good faith, the company has outright refused to
consider nearly all of the points raised by the union. Union members
continue their struggle despite threats of extreme violence from
paramilitaries who move freely in and around Drummond mining facilities.
Drummond Company has taken none of the steps requested in previous
alerts. We are now contacting Drummond's customers asking them to put
pressure on Drummond to negotiate in good faith and provide security
for its workers. Send an email to Allen
Franklin, Chairman and CEO of Southern Company, as well as president
and CEO-elect David Ratcliffe,and let them know the truth about
Drummond. If Drummond doesn't clean up its act in
Colombia, Southern Company should find another supplier and cancel existing contracts with Drummond.
Send an E-mail to the Southern Company:
http://capwiz.com/voice4change/issues/alert/?alertid=5588031&type=CU
Forward this alert as widely as possible:
http://www.voice4change.org/stories/send2friends.asp?id=040316~dw.asp
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For More Information:
Compaint Against Drummond
Wall Street Journal (note that the WSJ will soon issue a correction regarding inaccurate salary information.)
United Steelworkers: Result of Fact Finding Delegation
Murders of Locarno, Orcasita and Soler
Aviva Chomsky
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Background Article:
Drummond digs up
more than coal in Colombia
Tom Bassing, Birmingham Business Journal: http://www.bizjournals.com/birmingham/stories/2003/07/21/story3.html
As Alabama's known coal reserves dwindled, Birmingham-based Drummond
Co. Inc. more than a decade ago turned to the South American nation of
Colombia to expand the firm's mining operations.
The 68-year-old, family-owned business to date has spent nearly $1
billion in the impoverished nation, providing relatively well-paying
jobs and revitalizing entire communities - while turning a handsome
profit.
Now, however, the company, CEO Garry Drummond and the firm's top
executive in Colombia find themselves the target of several lawsuits -
the most recent of which was filed this month in federal district court
in Alabama - accusing them of conspiring with right-wing paramilitaries
to intimidate and murder mining union leaders.
The Colombian union claims in the latest suit that the defendants "have
hired, contracted with or otherwise directed paramilitary security
forces which have used extreme violence and have murdered, tortured,
unlawfully detained or otherwise silenced trade union leaders in
Colombia to commit these same acts against the union representing
workers at defendants' facilities."
The complaint alleges that, at the company's behest, the paramilitaries
in 2001 boarded Drummond buses transporting workers, identified union
leaders and shot them to death.
Drummond officials categorically deny the allegations. Providing economic aid
Drummond's foray into South America began when "we signed a 20-year
contract with the Colombian government in 1989," says Mike Tracy,
Drummond's vice president and executive assistant to the CEO.
Production began in 1995.
Since winning the Colombian mining concession, the company has hired
and trained 1,700 Colombians to work the extensive surface mine and has
spent tens of millions of dollars improving living standards in the
communities near the project, Tracy says. Drummond plans to open two
more mines by 2010.
In a news release issued last year, following the first of the three
lawsuits, the company said it "takes great pride in our contribution to
the economically depressed region in which we operate in Colombia. We
also feel very good about the economic benefits received by our workers
in Colombia."
In his office in The Towers Building on Red Mountain, Tracy flips
through a photo album illustrating the company's efforts to build
medical clinics, schools and other community centers.
"We don't have to do any of this," he says. "To see what we've done
down there, (the legal action against the company) not only makes you
angry, it hurts."
Tracy says the company spends $5 million a year on community projects,
from paving roads to building water- and sewer-treatment plants in
various villages throughout the mining region. Agreement and allegations
No one argues that Drummond's Colombian employees haven't benefited
through jobs that, Tracy says, "pay five times the average national
wage" or wages and benefits equal to $24,000 a year per employee.
Even Terry Collingsworth, the executive director of Washington, D.
C.-based International Labor Rights Fund, which is a plaintiff in the
lawsuits, says, "these are perfectly fine jobs. We have no dispute with
that. They're not running a sweat shop; employees aren't in chains."
Yet, he says, getting to the heart of the legal fight, "there was a
meeting in Alabama with Garry Drummond in which options were discussed."
The latest suit claims those options, discussed at a 1997 meeting in
Drummond's Birmingham headquarters, involved "how to deal with the
'union problem,'" and thus "the campaign of violence against the union
officially began."
The union alleges that Drummond Co. paid the paramilitary forces to murder the three union leaders in 2001.
"We have a field affidavit that we can't release publicly right now,"
Collingsworth says, in which "a former Drummond employee describes how
funds were transferred between Alabama and Colombia for the purpose of
paying the paramilitaries." An unequivocal denial
Understandably, the company and its attorneys dispute the allegations.
While "hundreds of union leaders clearly have been murdered by
paramilitaries," says William Jeffress, a Washington attorney with the
firm of Baker Botts LLP, which is representing Drummond, "there's no
validity whatsoever" to the complaints listed in the lawsuits.
The defendants, he says, "were shocked that they would be accused of
murder. They're completely innocent of any complicity in these murders."
Drummond officials say, in fact, they appreciate the union.
"When you have 1,700 employees, it's nice to have a bargaining unit,"
says Tracy, who questions the International Labor Rights Fund's motives
in bringing the legal action against the company.
Garry Drummond in April 2002, after the first of the three lawsuits was
filed in federal court in Alabama, received a letter from a New
York-based firm called Political & Economic Link Consulting, which
offered to help the company "respond to issues arising in conflict
zones," involving "volatile relationships with labor advocates and
non-governmental organizations, particularly in regions where these
relationships are made more difficult by the presence of public and
paramilitary armed forces."
Tracy notes that one of the firm's consultants listed in the letter, Pharis Harvey, is a co-founder of the labor rights fund.
"That's curious right there, don't you think?," Tracy says.
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