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This is a season for hardcore pathos in the Panamanian labor movement. As one administration ceases to function and another gets ready to take office, workers who lost their jobs years ago are taking to the streets with forlorn hopes of some sort of relief. On this particular day the protesters were those who lost their jobs when the Pérez Balladares administration privatized the ports of Balboa and Cristobal in 1997, granting those facilities in a concession contract to Hong Kong-based Hutchison Whampoa, which now operates them through its Panama Ports Company subsidiary. Toro worked the deal so that the former public sector managers got very handsome severance benefits, but the workers got a "special deal" well short of what should have been theirs under the labor laws of the time. So now the former port workers were milling around in front of legisative committee offices, demanding that the contract giving the port concession to Hutchison Whampoa be rescinded. Actually, between Americans of the far right persuasion who don't like a Chinese presence so close to the canal and Panamanians from across the political spectrum who are incensed at the huge reduction in contractual payments that Hutchison Whampoa extracted from the Moscoso administration, there is a potential coalition out there to advocate the company's ouster. But what was happening here was just a longshot bid to see if something might be obtained from a lame duck administration that was always hostile to organized labor in the first place. Photo by Eric Jackson







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