Seguro Social dialogue underway, with rough stuff on the sidelines

Dialogue underway, with hardball being played mostly away from the table

by Eric Jackson, mostly from other media

The national dialogue on the Social Security Fund (CSS) reforms is underway. The FRENADESSO strikers' umbrella group has tacitly accepted the facilitating role of Panama Technological University rector Salvador Rodríguez without formally withdrawing its objection that the Council of University Rectors is too biased toward the PRD to serve as an impartial facilitating organization. Three work committees, to deal with finances, the health care system and pensions respectively, have been formed and the 13 participating entities have each appointed teams, for the most part composed of recognized experts in their fields, for these committee talks.

The major points of friction in the talks so far have been about representation and methodology.

Factions that supported the strike and some of the business representatives have insisted that other segments of society not formally represented at the talks be given some sort of opportunity to participate, if not by seats at the dialogue table then at least by an opportunity to present their cases to the formal participants. This issue came to a boiling point on July 18 when a delegation of bus drivers from around the country arrived at the Council of Rectors headquarters early in the morning and asked to speak. At the main dialogue table there was an inconclusive two-hour debate about whether the drivers, who are independent small proprietors who drive their own buses, should be allowed to address the dialogue for 10 minutes. When, late in the afternoon, it appeared that the day's session would end without the drivers, some who had come from as far away as Bocas del Toro, being allowed to speak, the drivers burst into the negotiating room and the day's proceedings ended in with a lot of pushing, shoving and shouting.

FRENADESSO has been steadfastly demanding that all economic data related to Seguro Social be fully revealed and that the sessions where this is done be televised. While the government has not flatly refused to reveal the financial statistics and claims that its policy is one of full transparency, the sessions aren't being televised. However, the strikers are not being kept entirely in the dark about the true financial picture, as one member of their team of experts is economics professor Juan Jované, the former CSS director, and FRENADESSO can count upon inside data from most of the CSS statisticians, who were among those who went on strike against Law 17.

In the absence of any fully published data, CSS director René Luciani is claiming to a sympathetic press that the fund will dip into the red next year. On the one hand, that's a far more alarmist picture than those of most serious analysts, who expect that without changes the fund will start showing an overall deficit in seven or eight years; and on the other hand it's a tacit admission that several years of propaganda from government officials and most of the mainstream media that the CSS is already deeply in the red was false.

Most of the rough stuff has been happening outside of the dialogue room. For examples:

· In the hall outside of one of the early session, members of the eight-group Confederation of Retirees and Pensioners got physical in an argument over negotiating posture and had to be separated by church representatives.

· The government, whose payments of many bills have been delayed dating back to the Moscoso administration, finally paid dues to professional associations it owed for a number of government employees to some of the 18 groups that are part of the Federation of Professional Association (FEDAP). This, in turn, led FRENADESSO leader AndrŽs Rodríguez to accuse the government of trying to buy off FEDAP, but the federation's lead negotiator Luis Chen --- who participated in some of the protests against Law 17 --- said that the federation's independence would not be compromised.

· The union for Seguro Social's doctors and dentists, AMOACSS, was one of the bastions of support for the strike. Nevertheless, some members were among FRENADESSO's strongest critics. The government first refused to certify the AMOACSS delegates to participate in the dialogue, and then on July 15 the Registro Publico ruled that the papers for the election of the union's secretary general, Dr. Amado Samudio, had been falsified and thus the former leader of AMOACSS, Dr. Guillermo Pérez Silva, who had been ousted in a rank-and-file revolt after disputed elections last year, was reinstated as the union's secretary general. It appears that by this move the government has replaced a pro-strike union leader with a more pliable secretary general, but the final chapter in this story has yet to be written.

· With the firing en masse of the FETV news department and in particular the cancellation of the Confrontacion talk show, all of the television news departments and all of the daily newspapers are now, to varying degrees, openly hostile to the strikers. Among the newspapers the most hysterical has been La Estrella, the lowest-circulation daily that depends for its existence on government advertising. On television the MEDCOM channels have been the most flagrantly biased. As an example of the latter, on the July 19 edition of RPC's Debate Abierto talk show, a Partido Popular spokesman called the previous day's incident with the bus drivers an example of FRENADESSO "anarchy" and "violence" --- even though the bus drivers are not part of FRENADESSO and have a troubled relationship with the main unions in the strike coalition because those groups have opposed bus fare hikes. When the CONUSI spokeswoman replied, someone at RPC spoke over her voice to in effect shout her down.

· President Torrijos has seen his support rise sharply from the level at the height of the strike, though not to the point where it was before he announced his Seguro Social reforms. This may be taken as a sign that the government's media control strategy is working, although much of it is surely a reflection of a perception that he was wise to back down over Law 17 as those workers who walked off the job remained steadfast in their strike and the possibilities for a tragic incident to inflame the situation grew.

Thus the talks continue, with a late August goal of an agreement on modifications to Law 17 and an absolute deadline that falls in early October.