Brazil's Petrobras Workers Threaten August Nationwide Strike
Written by Newsroom
Monday, 21 July 2008
Offshore oil workers from Brazil's oil multinational Petrobras have ended a five-day walkout but warned they may call a new, nationwide strike against the state-controlled company next month. Petrobras issued a statement saying the strike and a later work slowdown by refinery workers had not affected production levels.
The Norte Fluminense Oil Workers Union started a five-day strike at midnight Sunday, demanding workers' departure days from oil platforms be counted as paid work days. Petrobras offered overtime pay instead of the extra day off but this was rejected by the union.
The union represents workers on offshore production rigs in the Campos Basin, which accounts for 85% of Petrobras' crude output. Production fell in the early hours of the strike on Monday but Petrobras got output back to normal by early Tuesday after emergency crews were dispatched to platforms.
The walkout involved some 4.500 workers in the Campos basin. Petrobras, one of the world largest oil companies, pumps an average of 1.6 million barrels of crude a day.
Regional chapters of the unions will meet over the next few days leading up to a general meeting on July 25. At that time they will vote on whether to go ahead with a national strike planned for August 5 that would target production at offshore rigs, refineries and distribution centers.
"We are going to sit down today to discuss where we are weak and were we are strong so that when we go on strike with a broader action there won't be problems," said union director José Genivaldo Silva.
Petrobas Union employees are crazy to think that they can strike another deal. It didn't hurt the company last time and it probably wont hurt the company next. The only way to sabotage the company would be to take it at the heart of the company. Off shore oil wells are only a small percentage of the companies revenues.
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Joao call your oil contacts written by jon,
July 23, 2008
Petrobras we need your help in deep water!!!!
Wealth of oil in Arctic, report says The Canadian Press
A new study suggests that the equivalent of 30 billion barrels of oil lie undiscovered underneath the sea ice and frigid waters of North America's Arctic.
The report by the U.S. Geological Service has for the first time put some hard numbers behind the energy potential of the North and could add new urgency to the debate over control of those resources.
Most of the oil and gas lies in waters that Canada shares with the United States and Denmark, and which are subject to boundary disputes.
Most of it also lies offshore, presenting energy companies with tough challenges in bringing it to market.
The survey suggests that there is the equivalent of 412 billion barrels of oil throughout the Arctic, most of it off the coast of Russia.
That is more than twice the 173 billion barrels of oil thought to lie in Alberta's oilsands.
The small, coastal town of Condé is located just a twenty minute's drive from João Pessoa, the capital of Paraíba. The Northeast of Brazil has historically been a place of encounter and mixing between peoples. For millenia groups of indigenous people fished, farmed, migrated and sometimes fought along this large, fertile area.
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Offshore oil workers from Brazil's oil multinational Petrobras have ended a five-day walkout but warned they may call a new, nationwide strike against the state-controlled company next month. Petrobras issued a statement saying the strike and a later work slowdown by refinery workers had not affected production levels.
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The small, coastal town of Condé is located just a twenty minute's drive from João Pessoa, the capital of Paraíba. The Northeast of Brazil has historically been a place of encounter and mixing between peoples. For millenia groups of indigenous people fished, farmed, migrated and sometimes fought along this large, fertile area. 
The Brazilian diplo-MÁ-cia (bad diplomacy) carries on its accelerated course towards the non-acknowledgment of human rights, although sometimes it takes pleasure in saying that it does precisely the opposite. The visit of Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is another example of a diplomatic omission that verges on hypocrisy. 
On July 4, 2006, representatives of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay met in Caracas to sign the protocol for the entrance of Venezuela into the Southern Common Market (Mercosur). After two and a half years, the protocol was approved by the legislative bodies of Argentina and Uruguay, and as of now it may be only days away from being ratified by the continent's economic megalith, Brazil. 
Some sectors of the fight against AIDS have suggested that Thabo Mbeki, the former president of South Africa, committed genocide through his absence from the fight against the illness in his country throughout his two terms. 
One hundred and eleven years after Brazil abolished slavery, the number of workers deprived of their freedom is still huge. They raise cattle, produce charcoal, sugar cane or timber. Some of them, most undocumented Bolivians, work in basements of small apparel factories in São Paulo and other metropolis. 
On November 7, 2009 a few friends and I had an opportunity to take a look inside a Brazilian jail outside the city of Rio de Janeiro. We were able to take some amateur footage of our experience on video (see link below). It's no surprise, of course, that the typical Brazilian jail lacks some of the functionality of those in North America or Europe, but our experience that day was quite shocking. 
Depletion of the Amazon Rainforest is not a new concern facing environmentalists, biologists, ecologists, and a growing number of the Amazonian indigenous peoples. For decades they have feared for the fate of the world's most biologically diverse and species-rich hothouse. 
Geisy Arruda made history this week in Brazil, but for all the wrong reasons. What began as a poorly planned fashion statement has become a worldwide tale. Geisy decided to wear a pink mini-dress to her private college in São Paulo state, and after that, all hell broke loose. 
The push of vigilante groups in Rio de Janeiro's favelas (shantytowns) in the last three years is the most important and alarming information of the just-released study by the Rio de Janeiro University's Violence Research Center (Nupev-Uerj). 
A dispute over drug trafficking territory in Rio de Janeiro has intensified lately, leaving in its wake unprecedented acts of violence, such as the downing of a police helicopter in the northern zone of the city on October 17. Three policemen died and another two were injured. This event has drawn the attention of the international media, who are raising the issue of public security for the 2016 Olympics to be held in Rio.