ATTEMPTED UNION BUSTING

Exxon Beaumont Union Accepts Deal After Nearly Ten-Month Lockout

Barbara Powell
Mon, February 21, 2022


(Bloomberg) -- Union members, who’ve been locked out of Exxon Mobil Corp.’s Beaumont refinery on the Texas Gulf Coast since May, accepted the company’s latest contract offer Monday, people familiar with the vote said.

Approval by the union means Exxon and workers will now negotiate a return-to-work agreement for union-represented employees, ending the nearly 10-month lockout. Temporary workers have been running the refinery since May 1. The approval comes four months after members of the local United Steelworkers union resoundingly turned down a previous deal to end the labor dispute.

The new local contract makes Martin Luther King Jr. a paid holiday and amends some language including the makeup of a workmen’s committee.

Approving a new worker agreement removes uncertainty about having an adequately trained labor force at a time when Exxon is working to expand the 369,000-barrel-a-day site by 250,000 barrels. The expansion will add a new crude unit that could process light, low-sulfur crude from the Permian Basin by 2023, making Beaumont the largest refinery in the U.S.

A six-year labor pact between the USW local and Exxon expired last February without a new collective bargaining agreement in place. The two sides continued to negotiate and the old contract at first remained in effect using 24-hour extensions. Exxon, which made it clear it wanted to control costs and have a flexible work agreement to maintain competitiveness, locked out the 650 union-represented members of USW Local 13-243 at the refinery and adjoining lubricant oil plant in May.

Texas oil refinery workers ratify Exxon labor contract offer

Erwin Seba
Mon, February 21, 2022

Exxon Mobil begins lockout of workers from Texas plant


By Erwin Seba

BEAUMONT, Texas (Reuters) -Union workers locked out of their jobs at a Texas oil refinery for nearly 10 months voted on Monday to accept an Exxon Mobil Corp contract offer, ceding to a key company demand that it have the right to determine plant assignments.

About 600 United Steelworkers union members at the 369,024 barrel-per-day (bpd) refinery and Mobil 1 motor oil plant were locked out May 1 to preclude a wildcat strike, Exxon has said. The Beaumont, Texas, facility has continued to run since with managers and temporary workers.


The contract allows Exxon to decide all assignments, an issue that led to a rejection vote in October. A quarter of assignments previously were determined by worker seniority. The contract also adds Martin Luther King Jr. Day as a paid holiday.

Exxon said it was "thrilled" by the vote, adding employees would return to work "as soon as safely possible." The contract was made effective from Feb. 1, 2021.

The six-year contract was approved by a vote of 214 to 133, according to USW International representative Bryan Gross.

"The membership decided to accept the offer after 10 months of a fight," Gross said. "The company started the lockout; they can end it at any time." USW local 13-243 intends to continue with an unfair labor practices complaint, Gross said. The USW has alleged Exxon imposed the lockout to force removal of the union.

Also to be decided is whether the USW will continue to represent the plant's hourly workers. The U.S. National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) oversaw a vote in November and December on removing the USW, a move sought by 30% of union members.

Before the Beaumont workers can return to work, the two sides must negotiate an agreement that sets rules for returning employees. Preliminary talks on the agreement began last week.

(Reporting by Erwin Seba in Beaumont, Texas; Editing by Shivani Singh)

Exclusive-HSBC targets 34% cut to emissions from oil and gas clients by 2030

Simon Jessop, Tommy Wilkes and Lawrence White
Mon, February 21, 2022

FILE PHOTO: The HSBC bank logo is seen at their offices in

 the Canary Wharf financial district in London

LONDON (Reuters) - HSBC aims to cut emissions associated with loans made to its oil and gas clients by 34% this decade, the bank's sustainability chief told Reuters, marking the first time that Britain's biggest lender has committed to such a target.

More than 100 banks have pledged to reach net zero carbon emissions by 2050 and are under pressure to provide details on the deep shorter-term cuts to "financed emissions" that are needed if banks are to have any chance of meeting their goal.

"This is rewiring the way we make financing and investment decisions from here on in," Group Chief Sustainability Officer Celine Herweijer said of HSBC's 2030 targets.

HSBC is a major lender to corporate clients across Asia and some of the world's biggest oil and gas companies, and its plan is expected to set the tone for other banks in the region, most of which have yet to release targets.

HSBC said its oil and gas target was based on 'absolute' reductions rather than 'carbon intensity', which measures emissions per unit of energy or barrel of oil and gas produced, and so could see actual emissions rise.

Climate activists say intensity-based targets do not go far enough if the world is to keep global warming from rising beyond 1.5 degrees Celsius from pre-industrial levels, which scientists deem crucial to prevent catastrophic climate change.

"There's no way that you can move to a net-zero economy by 2050 if you have intensity-based metrics in the energy sector," Herweijer told Reuters.

Among the biggest global banks, few have committed to absolute targets, although Citigroup last month vowed to reduce its energy-sector absolute emissions by 29% by 2030.

HSBC's new targets also include a plan to reduce by 75% the intensity of financed emissions for power and utility clients.

Herweijer said this target was intensity-based, rather than absolute, because electricity consumption globally would need to rise during the transition to a lower-carbon economy.

The bank's targets are aligned with the International Energy Agency's Net Zero Emissions by 2050 Scenario, which Herweijer said was the hardest to meet but "doable".

HSBC said on Tuesday targets for the coal, aluminium, cement, iron, steel and transport sectors would follow in 2023.

BIGGEST CLIENTS

Around 100 large upstream and integrated companies are responsible for 90% of HSBC's oil and gas sector financed emissions, and the bank has given them an end of 2022 deadline to produce plans on how they intend to decarbonise.

The targets will cover so-called Scope 1 and 2 emissions, those linked to a company's own operations, and Scope 3 which are produced when customers use their products and which Herweijer said account for 80% of their emissions.

While focused on helping clients to plan, those who did not risked losing access to finance, Herweijer said, adding that a major challenge is the variability in emission disclosures.

"There's a big diversification on how different companies are measuring and reporting, if at all, on Scope 3, and the extent of that," she said.

Like most banks, HSBC's targets exclude capital markets activity such as underwriting bonds and share placements, although this would change as standard accounting for 'facilitated emissions' becomes available.

While that may not happen until later this year, Herweijer said HSBC was not "ignoring capital markets" and for future deals was "thinking about the financed emissions of them as part of our decision making".

(Editing by Alexander Smith)

Duterte warns unvaccinated people:

 ‘If you die, good riddance’
By: Daphne Galvez - Reporter / @DYGalvezINQ
INQUIRER.net / 10:55 PM February 07, 2022


President Rodrigo Duterte in his “Talk to the People” on Jan. 24, 2022. (File phot from a PCOO live stream)

MANILA, Philippines — “I’m warning you. Don’t be complacent. If you die, and you’re not vaccinated, I will tell you: Good riddance,’” President Rodrigo Duterte, speaking in a mix of English and Filipino, said in his weekly taped address, “Talk to the People,” that aired late on Monday.

He addressed the warning to those who refuse to get vaccinated as he stressed the Philippines was not yet “over the hump” in its battle against COVID-19.

“If you don’t want it [vaccination], you want to die. OK then. Walk around, and if you get contaminated, you will feel very, very sorry for yourself and your family,” Duterte added.

He encouraged parents to get their children vaccinated as the government had approved the vaccination of kids aged 5 to 11.

The government is set to hold another national vaccination drive on Feb. 10 and 11, this one for at least six million individuals, including children aged 5 to 11 years.

Qatar’s World Cup turf needs chilled stadiums, desalinated water to thrive

on February 21, 2022
By Sonia Ulebor


Winter will come early to soccer stadiums in baking-hot Qatar when groundskeepers blast chilled air starting in September to ensure pitch turf thrives in the desert country for the World Cup.

Mimicking winter in the Gulf state, where temperatures can swelter at 40 Celsius (104 Fahrenheit) in the fall, is just one trick experts have introduced over the last 14 years to improve turf quality and increase the number of soccer pitches.

An elite corps of groundskeepers now maintains 144 green, lush fields — eight stadium pitches and 136 training grounds. They blast chilled air through nozzles directly at the turf, tending luxuriant patches of green dotted amid the dun or grey of Qatar’s desert and concrete.

“The weather condition and the climate together with the level of performance criteria we have set for ourselves makes it extremely challenging to develop the product we need. But we succeeded,” said Haitham Al Shareef, a Sudanese civil engineer who has worked on Qatar’s pitches since 2007.

Preparing turf for the World Cup, being held for the first time in the Middle East, is environmentally costly.

Qatar flies in 140 tonnes of grass seed annually from the United States on climate-controlled aircraft, Al Shareef said, and pitches are watered with desalinated seawater, in an energy-intensive process burning the country’s wealth of natural gas.

Each pitch requires 10,000 litres of desalinated water daily in winter and 50,000 litres in the summer, he added.

WEAR AND TEAR

The 28-day event begins in November at perhaps the most challenging time of year for durable turf, as Qatar‘s weather transitions from searing summer to mild winter.

Some grass varieties turn dormant as temperatures rise and winter ryegrass takes root, making adequate growth a challenge between matches.

“When you have wear and tear, you want the grass to keep growing to recover,” Al Shareef said. “If you seed the pitch too early, you will have germination, but the winter grass will not really grow, it will actually die because it’s too warm.”

So groundskeepers trigger winter in September, seeding pitches with ryegrass in a practice that has over the last three years yielded durable pitches.

Qatar has also countered the risk of fungus and disease outbreaks with a maintenance regime involving chemical cocktails, grass mowers that vacuum debris and an underground system that sucks excess moisture, said a UEFA pitch consultant.

“You’re one disease outbreak from failure,” said consultant Dean Gilasbey, who has trained groundskeepers around the world.

Qatar says it is is prepared for any turf emergency.

A 425,000 sq metre reserve of grass – some 40 soccer pitches worth – is growing at a farm north of Doha.

It can be harvested, trucked to a stadium and layed down ready for play in as little as eight hours, said Mohamed Al Atwaan, who worked as a project manager on Stadium 974.

Organisers have declined to say how much the turf programme has cost Qatar, a wealthy gas exporter that spent billions on infrastructure over the last decade to prepare for the event.


(Reporting and writing by Andrew Mills; Editing by Ghaida Ghantous, John Stonestreet, William Maclean)

French Communist presidential candidate Roussel fights back against fake jobs claims

Tracy MCNICOLL - Yesterday 1

France 24


French Communist Party presidential candidate Fabien Roussel fought back on Monday after allegations he was paid in public funds for five years for a fictitious job.

Investigative news site Mediapart on Sunday cast doubt on the veracity of Roussel's employment as a parliamentary assistant from 2009 and 2014, saying the Communist former journalist didn't work out of National Assembly lawmaker Jean-Jacques Candelier's constituency office in northern France and citing associates of the deputy who couldn't describe any work Roussel had carried out in the role.

Mediapart said Roussel had not provided any document, e-mail or text message proving he had completed work under Candelier despite repeated requests in the 10 days before the muckraking website published the story on Sunday.

On Monday, the Communist candidate said he had "the documents" that will show he did the work. "I worked for five years with Candelier, with the colleagues I had alongside him. They and Jean-Jacques can bear witness to the work we did together," Roussel told Europe 1 of his stint working for the former National Assembly deputy.

"I was with him, and without him, to keep tabs on the conflict in the Douai area, his area," Roussel responded to the accusations on Monday. "I have the working documents that I put together with him on these topics, with the trade unionists," he continued. "I will show them."

Candelier, for his part, said in a statement he was "surprised and indignant" over the Mediapart allegations, calling Roussel a "precious and efficient associate, on the ground, constantly in touch with a number of union players, elected officials and residents", with "a very astute knowledge of the economic and social situation" and "tight connections with many players in the area".

Roussel is the first French Communist Party nominee to join the race for the French presidency since 2007. The Communist gathered the 500 sponsorships needed from electoral officials across the country well ahead of schedule and applied to join the official presidential ballot over the weekend, he said.

Campaigning on a pledge of "Happy Days for France", Roussel is also one of the very few of a deep glut of left-wing presidential candidates with anything to smile about in the polls ahead of the election's first round on April 10. Indeed, Roussel's party linked the allegations levied by Mediapart to his relative momentum in the race.

French Communist Party spokeswoman Cécile Cukierman noted that "today, the law doesn't define a typical job description, the traceability of parliamentary assistants' work". She added that Roussel's "choice" not to respond to Médiapart's requests "doesn't make him guilty".

"Would we be talking so much about this if he had stayed at 1.5 percent in the polls?" Cukierman asked Agence France Presse. Roussel polled at 5 percent, even with Greens candidate Yannick Jadot and ahead of Socialist Party nominee Anne Hidalgo (3 percent), in a survey released by the Opinionway firm on Friday.

"With only a month and a half to go before the first round, a thing like that comes out, I tell myself 'that's the game'," Roussel told Europe 1 on Monday.

"They made their enquiries by interviewing people who are at war with me. I don't have only friends, that's normal... But I do have dozens of people who could say what we did together, the battles that we even won together with Candelier," Roussel insisted.

The Communist challenged details in the Mediapart story, including his alleged €3,000 salary. "I started at €2,460 net, I finished at €2,700," he said.

Fake jobs was a notorious watchword of the previous French presidential race. The 2017 campaign was rocked by a fake-jobs scandal after revelations published by muckraking weekly Le Canard Enchaîné about conservative candidate François Fillon and his wife, Penelope. Once tipped to win the race, Fillon ultimately fell short of the run-off round, behind the centrist newcomer Emmanuel Macron and far-right leader Marine Le Pen. Fillon, a former prime minister, was later convicted alongside his wife and handed a five-year sentence. A verdict on Fillon's appeal is due in May.

(With AFP)

Tunisian NGOs triumph in David-vs-Goliath toxic waste battle with Italy

Sophie GORMAN - Yesterday 

France 24

Tunisia was victorious this weekend in a protracted David versus Goliath rubbish battle against Italy. On Saturday, a consignment of 7,900 tonnes of toxic waste illegally sent by Italy to Tunisia was sent back where it came from after an almost two-year legal wrangle spearheaded by small local environmental NGOs.

With its extensive white sandy beaches, sparkling turquoise sea, unbroken sunshine and lavish resorts, the pretty Tunisian seaside city of Sousse is best known as a holiday destination. But it has recently become famous for a much smellier reason: Since 2020, more than 200 big shipping containers filled with 7,900 tonnes of Italian toxic waste have been stuck in limbo in a port warehouse.

Between the end of May and the beginning of July 2020, 282 containers were exported by Italian company Sviluppo Risorse Ambientali (SRA) from the port of Salerno, in Italy’s Campania region, to this Tunisian port city. The Tunisian company importing them, Soreplast, declared to customs that they contained scrap plastic left over from manufacturing processes, which Soreplast said it would then recycle. But they were revealed to instead contain household and hospital waste, which is legally prohibited from being imported in Tunisia.

The Italian company SRA was established in 2008 through the sale of a branch of another company, Fond.Eco. Both companies ended up at the centre of a judicial investigation in 2016 conducted by Salerno's Anti-Mafia Investigation Directorate. Tommaso Palmieri, who runs both companies, was accused of leading an organisation that recycled bulk waste. SRA is also one of the companies included in an Italian parliamentary report on the link between the waste industry and organised crime.
€5 million contract

The containers were the first shipment of a €5 million contract to dispose of 120,000 tonnes of Italian waste in Tunisian landfills. Soreplast was being paid €48 per tonne of waste.

213 of the containers were stored at the port in Sousse, the remaining 69 were sent to a warehouse outside the city. The containers and their contents rotted away in these warehouses for over a year until they were officially seized by the Tunisian government last July. They ­– and their pungent odours – were to remain in place, however, for another seven months.

On December 28, 2021, Italian Minister of Foreign Affairs Luigi di Maio went to the capital Tunis for talks with President Kais Saied, in particular to address this thorny issue. At the end of this meeting, the Tunisian presidency published a Facebook statement, stressing "the need to accelerate the repatriation of the waste as soon as possible".

An agreement was finally signed on February 11 to return the rubbish to Italy. The Tunisian ministry of environment said in a statement posted after the meeting on its Facebook page that "the signing of this agreement is part of the continuity of the consultation process between the two countries, which began in 2020". The statement continued: "Among other things, this agreement provides for the immediate return of 213 containers in the first instance, out of a total of 282 containers, after 69 of them were involved in a fire."

The ministry added that consultations are continuing with regard to finalising the return of the remaining waste after containers were damaged by a fire, which broke out in the importers' warehouse in the governorate of Sousse. They did not elaborate on the state of the containers post-fire or when any subsequent transfer might take place.
‘Important victory’

Last Friday, the first 213 containers were loaded on a Turkish ship, chartered by the Italian authorities. The ship left Sousse at 8pm local time on Saturday.

Only a handful of people were invited to watch from the docks, including a number of politicians, one local television network and members of one voluntary network, Réseau Tunisie Vert, an NGO that had fought hard for this waste to be sent back to Italy.

“It was a very symbolic moment, watching them load up the boat and seeing it sail away into the night, we couldn’t believe it was finally happening,” said Nidhal Attai, member of the network and the co-ordinator of the environmental programme at the Heinrich Boll Foundation in Tunisia, speaking with FRANCE 24.

“This is a very important victory for Tunisian civil society. It was a very different kind of environmental battle than we are used to fighting, so this result will definitely boost the courage and the will of the people to take on issues like this.”
Italy’s dustbin

When news about the waste mountain mouldering at the port first emerged in local media, it provoked outrage from the population and local NGOs, who said they refused to allow their country to become Italy's dustbin.

“This type of trade is immoral and environmentally destructive; it is not acceptable to import waste from Italy to Tunisia for landfilling. Landfilling of waste can generate toxic leaching and contribute to the degradation of human health and the environment,” said Mohammed Tazrout, campaigner for Greenpeace Middle-East and North Africa, in a joint statement published by a number of NGOs.

Having developed into something of a David versus Goliath battle over the last two years, the outcome was the result of a united protest from a number of local and international NGOs, who kept constant pressure on the Tunisian government until they finally agreed a method with the Italian government to send back most of the containers.

“We met with three successive government ministers to push them into this result. We wrote to the president twice, with no reaction, and we reached out to international forces like the United Nations,” said Attai. “It was a major campaign.”

On December 21 2020, the Tunisian Minister of the Environment Mustapha Larou was arrested and about 25 officials - a dozen of whom were also arrested - were charged. The list of suspects also includes the name of Larou's head of his cabinet, the directors of the National Waste Management Agency and the Environmental Protection Agency, customs officials and the laboratory responsible for analysing waste from abroad. It also includes Beya Ben Abdelbaki, the Tunisian consul in Naples. One person missing from the list – and indeed Tunisia – is the owner of Soreplast, who has fled abroad.

“We have been pushing the ministry for the environment for more transparency for almost two years to share the information they have, but they held back until now,” said Attai. “There has been a complete lack of transparency about how the deal came about so far. People have been arrested and are waiting for their trials, but even when that is over, we don’t know if we will learn how this deal happened in the first place.”
Trafficking waste to Africa

In 1991, then Chief Economist of the World Bank Lawrence Summers signed a memo that defended the decades-old practice of trafficking waste from developed countries in the global north – where strict environmental regulations make its disposal prohibitively expensive – to less developed countries.

“I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that,” Summers’ controversial memo read. Summers later claimed he was being “sarcastic” in this section.

Outrage followed its publication, but the scandal did serve to raise the profile of one relatively recent environmental treaty, the 1989 Basel Convention on the control of hazardous waste, while also providing the impetus for the subsequent 1998 Bamako Convention These treaties were created to regulate the transit of toxic waste across borders. Bamako was specifically designed to ban the import of any waste that cannot be recycled to Africa. This Tunisia deal would appear to be in direct breach of that.

All of Tunisia's waste is managed in landfills. The country's largest, in Borj Chakir on the outskirts of the capital Tunis, takes in an estimated 3,000 tonnes of waste every day, a figure that is considerably more than the 44 tonnes per day permitted in EU landfills. Plastic bags are strewn everywhere and the waste has polluted nearby water sources.

“This Italian deal shows how our environment is another sector that is directly affected by corruption and bad governance,” said Attai. “We don’t talk about it enough as it is eclipsed by other priorities such as the economy. But what would all this waste do to our environment, to our land, if it was buried in our soil?”

“This was just the first wave of containers and there would have been many others if we hadn’t caused such protest. This scandal really highlights, at both a national and even international level, the current limitations of recycling. It will not be able to put an end to the problems of waste management," Attai said.

"We need to transform the way we treat domestic waste; we can’t simply bury it all in landfill sites.”

Chile museum to return Easter Island 'head'


The Moai Tau will be returned to Easter Island a century-and-a-half after it was taken from there by the Chilean navy (AFP/-)

Mon, February 21, 2022

Chile's National Museum of Natural History said Monday it will return to Easter Island an enormous stone statue taken from the Rapa Nui people and brought to the mainland 150 years ago.

The monolith is one of hundreds, called Moai, carved by the Rapa Nui in honor of their ancestors and sometimes referred to as the Easter Island heads.

The statues are today the island's greatest tourist attraction, sculpted from basalt more than 1,000 years ago.


The one being returned, dubbed Moai Tau, is a 715-kilogram (1,500-pound) giant brought by the Chilean navy some 3,700 kilometers (2,300 miles) across the Pacific in 1870.

Eight years later, it was moved to the natural history museum to be displayed.

The Rapa Nui, for whom the Moai represent the spirits of their ancestors, have been asking for the statue's return for years -- as well as other cultural treasures taken from their island.

"For the Rapa Nui, their ancestors, funerary objects and ceremonial materials may be as alive as members of their communities themselves," said a museum statement.

The return of the monolith "is profoundly significant as a gesture towards our indigenous peoples," said museum curator Cristian Becker.

With delays due to the coronavirus epidemic, the statue will finally depart from the port of Valparaiso next Monday on a trip of about five days to Easter Island, said the museum, "after a complex technical and diagnostic process" to guarantee its structural integrity.

A traditional ceremony was held at the museum Monday to send the statue safely on its way.

"It is essential that the Moai return to my homeland. For them (the community) and for me, this day is very much awaited," said Veronica Tuqui, a Rapa Nui representative.

Back on Easter Island, the Moai will be exhibited at the Father Sebastian Englert Anthropological Museum.

The Rapa Nui community has also asked the British Museum in London to return another Moai, dubbed Hoa Hakananai'a, that was taken in 1868 from Orongo, a ceremonial village on Easter Island.

The Rapa Nui in 2017 gained self-administration over their ancestral lands on Easter Island, a special territory of Chile.

msa/rsr/mlr/st

Dozens Killed In Explosion At Gold Mine In Southwest Burkina Faso
22-Feb-2022


The blast, at a makeshift gold-panning site at Gomgombiro in the southwest of the country happened when a stock of dynamite blew up, said local officials and hospital staff.

Images showed a large blast site of felled trees and destroyed tin houses. Bodies lay on the ground, covered in mats.

A hospital source said: "At least five casualties have succumbed to their wounds, bringing the toll to 55," adding that the toll could rise as some of the injured were in a critical condition.

Women and children were among the 60 or so injured in the blast, many of them in a critical condition, the source said.

It was not clear exactly what kind of gold mining went on at the site. Burkina Faso is home to some major gold mines run by international companies, but also to hundreds of smaller, informal sites that operate without oversight or regulation.

Children frequently work in these so-called artisanal mines; accidents are common.

Burkina Faso, one of the world's least developed countries, is under attack from Islamist groups linked to al Qaeda and Islamic State who seek control of mining sites as a means to fund their violent attacks.

Monday's blast was hundreds of miles from where these groups usually operate and there was no sign that Islamist militants were involved.

Source: REUTERS

KOREA

Why Hyundai Steel seeks to reduce workforce, despite record profits

By Park Jae-hyuk
Posted : 2022-02-22

Hyundai Steel's steel mill in Dangjin, South Chungcheong Province, is seen

 in this file photo. Courtesy of Hyundai Steel


Hyundai Steel CEO An Tong-il


Hyundai Steel is facing questions about its latest voluntary retirement scheme in light of the announcement of its record earnings last year, according to industry officials, Tuesday.

The steel manufacturing unit of Hyundai Motor Group decided recently to offer severance payments equivalent to three years of base wages, performance-based bonuses and additional compensation to white-collar workers aged over 53, if they apply for voluntary retirement by the end of this month. Those who have children can also receive tuition payments.

The decision was announced after the company posted 2.4 trillion won ($2 billion) in operating profit and 22.8 trillion won in sales for 2021.

Hyundai Steel carried out its first-ever voluntary retirement program three years ago in 2019, when it was suffering worsening profitability over rising iron ore prices. At that time, more than 100 senior office workers offered to resign, and the company paid out around 10 billion won in compensation.

Some industry insiders interpret the steelmaker's recent decision as part of its efforts to brace for a possible slowdown in the global steel industry, but the company denied the claim that its latest voluntary retirement scheme is intended as a workforce reduction.

"Employees can apply for retirement voluntarily," a Hyundai Steel spokesman said. "Our voluntary retirement program is intended to help our employees who want to start new careers."

He added that the number of employees to retire through the program is not fixed.

There is also speculation that Hyundai Steel's senior white-collar workers may be more reluctant to offer to resign this time, due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic that has made it difficult for retirees to run their own businesses with the severance payments.

Some of the steelmaker's white-collar workers criticized the company for its continuous attempts to reduce the number of senior office workers, without asking blue-collar workers to resign.

"Hyundai Steel has tended to discriminate against office employees in favor of production workers," a Hyundai Steel employee wrote on Blind, an anonymous chat app for verified employees. "White-collar workers have endured discriminatory treatment, including a wage freeze over the past few years, and now the company is offering voluntary retirement only to office workers."

KOREA

Punk bands foray into burgeoning hipster enclave
Posted : 2022-02-22 18:49


The members of 18Fevers / Courtesy of Jenikah Joy

By Jon Dunbar

After almost three decades, Korea's punk scene remains inextricably linked with the area near Hongik University, known as Hongdae ― but that's despite many attempts to escape and disperse or relocate scene activities.

"Hongdae is going through a personality crisis and has been for a while," Mathew Nolan, guitarist of the punk band 18Fevers, told The Korea Times. "The pandemic just made it worse."

His band is attempting to break free from Hongdae's orbit this Saturday, heading to eastern Seoul's Seongsu-dong (no, not Sangsu-dong) for a show.

"Seongsu has the reputation of being a hot place with tons of hipster culture like cafes, art galleries, graffiti," Nolan said. "Apparently it's called the Brooklyn of Seoul ― that could be debatable. But it lacks aggressive and energetic live music."

To fix that problem, he's organizing a show, titled "Punk City: Seongsu," at the new venue Club Music Space.

"I haven't been in Korea that long and really haven't done much in the scene until recently but even so I remember a time where there were some venues outside of Hongdae. They never seemed to last but it was cool to not have everything so centralized and I think that could still be possible," Nolan said.

"Punk is supposed to be infiltrative and get in people's faces to let them know it's here and it has something to say. When I was a kid we would have shows anywhere we could: Elks lodges, YMCAs, community centers, backyards, you name it. In high school we drove three hours to a small town to play a show at a venue we only knew as The Laundromat. It was literally a laundromat. People were diving off of the machines while we played. Why not Seongsu?"

He mentioned that he needed some convincing, after the venue owners reached out to him a few months ago about putting on a show there.

"At first I thought it was a crazy idea," he said. "Who is going to see a punk show in Seongsu? It probably is a crazy idea but they were really cool and the space looks like a Hongdae venue with good equipment and a nice setup."

Nolan stressed that he tried to keep the price low to make the show accessible.

"Nowadays you have shows with three or four local bands from 25,000 to 35,000 won and I understand things are weird and difficult now but I'm really worried this is the new normal and once we're out of this mess it'll stay that way," he said. "Punk rock is a hard sell for people that don't know much about it and it's even harder here in Korea where most people don't know underground music like it exists. If you're charging 30,000 won for a few bands then you aren't attracting new fans that may be curious."

Tickets cost 15,000 won for five bands, which comes to 3,000 won per band. The punk bands include Sweet Gasoline, Punk on Fire, Vanmal and the hardcore band Get to the Point. His own band, 18Fevers, was formed last year, a ragtag bunch of foreign guys and Korean women who all wear too much eye makeup and get along like a house on fire.

"I wanted kind of a mixed lineup with different styles represented like when I was a kid," Nolan said. "Really I just tried to think of bands I want to see and hang out with. When all your friends are musicians and you're a musician it's hard to see them play sometimes unless you play together."

Tickets are limited to 50 people, and all COVID-19 requirements will be followed at the show. Doors open at 5 p.m. Visit fb.com/18fevers for more information or 18fevers.bandcamp.com to listen, or go to tinyurl.com/punkcityseongsu to RSVP for the show.