World Day on Inco: Reports from Across the World

World Day on Inco: Reports from Across the World

8th October 2003

“For the sake of those whose lives are affected by these companies, their stories deserve to be told. For the sake of those who work every day for Inco, who live under the path of its pollution, who have died for it or who have been killed so that it and corporations like it could operate in Guatemala and Indonesia, for them this story is told. But not just for them.

For if each abuse by each company is but the result of the inexorable logic of the larger system, the old trade union slogan “an injury to one is an injury to all”, must be given new meaning. And an attack on one corporation, be it Inco or any other, must become an attack on all, on the entire corporate capitalist system.” - Jamie Swift in “The Big Nickel, Inco at Home and Abroad” (1977).

They came from the villages of Indonesia and into the streets of Jakarta. They protested
in Canada and New York. They rallied in New Caledonia and despatched letters to
company offices across the world. “They” were hundreds of people representing thousands of others affected by the operations of INCO, the “Big Nickel”. What follows are some of the reports of the first World Day of Action against one of the most devastating and
polluting of mining companies, held on October 7th.