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Every year Panama's labor unions march on Mayday in Panama City. It's Labor Day in Panama and most of the rest of the world, with the big exception being the United States, where it all started. This year's march was the day before Election Day, so it that meant a big march in the capital and local events in all of the main provincial cities, which allowed Interioranos staying close to home for the voting to participate as well. In Panama City a crowd of some 5,000 union members, some of whose leaders are bitter rivals, marched together from Parque Porras to Plaza Cinco de Mayo, where hundreds more working people awaited them. Despite the rivalries and differences within the Panamanian labor movement, those assembled were mostly saying the same sorts of things.

The radicals aren't the only faction that's opposing a possible Free Trade Area of the Americas or a disadvantageous bilateral Panamanian-American agreement. Taking their statements at face value, virtually all factions of Panama's fractious labor movement put their opposition to two things --- the contempleted "free trade" deals and schemes to privatize the Social Security Fund at the top of their political agendas.

The day after Mayday one of the leaders of the FENASEP government workers' union, Leandro Avila, was elected to the Legislative Assembly, running in San Miguelito on the PRD ticket. But some labor leaders urged the rank-and-file to boycott the May 2 vote.

Above, food workers in blue, city sanitation workers in the gold t-shirts, and organized labor --- which acts as bargaining agents for about 10 percent of the Panamanian work force --- united against privatizing Social Security.

Since Canal Zone times, most Panama Canal workers are represented by US-based international unions and enjoy a standard of living comparable to that of working people in the industrialized countries. It's illegal for canal workers to strike, and historically the canal unions have not had much to do with the national labor movement. However, this year the International Association of Machinists, an AFL-CIO affiliate that represents some of the canal employees, turned up to manifest their working class solidarity and their opposition to the privatization of Seguro Social.

Also in this section:
Business & Economy briefs
US-RP trade talks underway
Anatomy of a scam, part 3 of 4
Mayday: unions oppose Seguro privatization, FTAA

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