business & economy

Also in this section:
Teachers lose pay dispute, go back to work
The ACP's scandal plagued consultant, Parsons Brinckerhoff
Influence peddling alleged in BANISTMO Law
US child labor report criticizes Panama
Business & Economy Briefs

A teacher - student - parent assembly in Veraguas, whose

teachers' union is Panama's most militant. Photo by AEVE

Teachers go back to work, having won very little

by Eric Jackson

By the second week in September, striking schoolteachers began to talk about how their struggle was "not a competition but a resistance." With the government refusing to budge and students going back to schools with classrooms attended to by substitutes or by parents, their money was running out and the corporate mainstream media had nothing but derision for the strikers.

In any other circumstance, other labor unions would have walked out in sympathy and the campus militants would have poured out into the streets to do battle with riot police, but that had been the Torrijos administration's intention all along. The name of the game was to provoke a strike by refusing to deal with the established unions and instead talk to a collection of pro-government paper organizations, then when the street scenes got chaotic use that for political ammunition in an attempt to reverse the "yes" campaign's fading fortunes and snatch victory from the jaws of defeat in the October referendum. FRENADESO et al decided not to take the bait, but the teachers' unions decided not to take the government's insult. Thus the teachers walked out, but the only street violence that the government could play up was from a few high school kids and a pro-government faction of Seguro Social workers trying to give the impression that they were FRENADESO rather than provocateurs.

So the strike turned into a prolonged, stubborn and sullen standoff, which turned in the government's favor when police surrounded teacher union offices, gassed and beat up peacefully marching strikers and issued an ultimatum that those who didn't return to work would be fired. On September 15, after nearly a month on strike, the unions signed an agreement by which the government moved up some of the $90 worth of pay raises over five years that they had granted in their talks with the pro-government organizations and the unionized teachers went back to work.

Chalk it up as a defeat for the unions in a strike that the government wanted. The big question is whether it turned the political tide in the campaign for the October 22 referendum, which had been running in favor of the "no" campaign that most of the teachers support.

                     "A resistance, not a competition." Photo by Eric Jackson

Also in this section:
Teachers lose pay dispute, go back to work
The ACP's scandal plagued consultant, Parsons Brinckerhoff
Influence peddling alleged in BANISTMO Law
US child labor report criticizes Panama
Business & Economy Briefs