Report: Kenya's anti-union highway

Abstract

the KLDTDAWU called on the ITF family for international solidarity support. The ITF immediately launched a campaign calling for an end to the violence and for the company to negotiate with the union. The first step was to raise the flag and stop the police aggression. The ITF’s General Secretary, acting on behalf of 4.5 million transport workers, contacted the CEO of Agility Logistics and urged the company to negotiate with workers . Meanwhile, the ITF set about spreading the word amongst the union family about the shocking violence Agility workers faced for demanding their rights. A LabourStart campaign was launched and within two days more than five thousand people sent a message to CEO Tarek Abdul Aziz Sultan calling for respect and union recognition. At the end of March an ITF monitoring team, accompanied by an official from the Britain’s UNITE the Union, arrived in Kenya to meet with the Agility CEO in Kenya, Kola Saibaba. The team gathered evidence and workers’ stories needed for a strategic campaign. In Nairobi, the team met with truck drivers and mechanics at Agility’s Gilgil Road depot and the Agility warehouse at Broadway. The ITF team also travelled to meet with workers at the Agility branch in Mombasa. At the Gilgil Road depot, workers told the ITF about their unsafe and unfair working conditions. “We are working 24/7. When it comes to accidents we just take care of ourselves. When it comes to payment, it’s very little . We have families and we can’t make it with this salary”, explained Ronald, an Agility Logistics trucker based in Nairobi. At the Broadway warehouse , workers told the ITF that their jobs were to be outsourced with only a few days notice and that their new employer was trying to force them to sign a new contract, which failed to give any information about their new terms and conditions . Workers feared that they could be forced to work in different locations far away from their homes. Workers also reported that management had required them to work an extra three hours, apparently in an attempt to prevent them meeting the ITF team. Then, in Mombasa, four Agility workers, who were active members of the union, told the ITF that they had recently received notice that they would be transferred to new workplaces. The workers reported that they were given only nine days’ transfer notice. Truck drivers involved in the recent strike also complained that they were facing reprisals from management. They reported that they had been sent on journeys without enough fuel, leading to some of them becoming stranded. Agility told its workers that their salaries would be delayed, a move which workers regarded as retaliation for the recent strike. Drivers who had been involved Agility Logistics workers demand decent work and a voice at work INTERNATIONAL union rights Page 18 Volume 22 Issue 2 2015 ISABEL CORTES, International Transport Workers' Federation, London T ruck drivers, warehouse and clerical workers in Kenya are demanding a voice at work and safe and fair working conditions. They are all employees at Agility Logistics, one of the world’s largest logistics companies, headquartered in Kuwait. Together they facilitate the flow of goods on Kenya’s Northern Corridor, a key route linking land-locked Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi with Kenya’s maritime port of Mombasa. Agility joins a list of companies operating in this region that are notoriously anti-union. In March this year a group of Agility truckers began a peaceful protest against excessive working hours, intimidation and denial of union recognition. Police responded with violence and intimidation. Four months later, following a call for international solidarity and many broken promises from Agility, the workers and their union, the Kenya Long Distance Truck Drivers and Allied Workers Union (KLDTDAWU) remain determined and are standing firm in their fight for rights along the anti-union highway. The trigger On 3 March, drivers parked their trucks on the main highway between Mombasa and Nairobi in a peaceful protest against excessive working hours, intimidation and denial of union recognition by Agility Logistics. A second group of drivers gathered near to Mai Mahui, on the road between Nairobi and...