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The Panamanian Workers Party (PTP), led by psychologist and Seguro Social employees' union leader Priscila Vásquez, is one of the dissident leftist groups alienated by FRENADESO's rejection of electoral politics

Mayday marchers demonstrate trends in the labor movement

photos by Eric Jackson

Do you have this stereotypical view of Mayday, the product of an American education and the limited information imparted by the US corporate media? Do you think it was something that started with the Russian Revolution and has to do with weapons displays in communist countries?

Well, Mayday started in 1886 in Chicago, with a march called by the American Federation of Labor in support of the eight-hour work day. That memory has been suppressed in the USA. From a standard US education you'd never know that the concept of a "weekend" exists because of labor unions either.

But in most of the rest of the world, Mayday is Labor Day, a legal holiday and an occasion for labor organizations of the left, right and center to hold picnics, parades and rallies. It's like that here in Panama, too.

Which is not to say that the labor movement is very powerful these days in Panama. It's not. A few dozen families hold economic power here and the current government has gone well out of its way to smash any truly independent labor activism. The last few years have seen a few small victories and several notable big defeats for organized labor, and that has exacerbated existing divisions.

And is there any mainstream medium that reports news about organized labor straight-up? Not a chance. The PRD and the rabiblancos it represents pressured the Catholic FETV to take all its programming that allowed an undistorted labor point of view off the air in 2005 and the independent RCM TV news network became a PRD dependency last year, with the first change being the blackout of labor voices during the canal expansion campaign. The corporate mainstream's hostility to labor showed through bright and clear in such reporting of this year's Mayday parade as it allowed as well.

There were many sub-contingents, but essentially four major labor groupings that marched on Mayday. Although it's slightly simplistic to characterize it as such, by and large there were two contingents on the "right" and two on the "left," the more conservative ones making their way down Avenida Central first. The most striking trends to be seen were the loss of support of organized labor's main antagonists of two years ago, the obsequious CONATO and the belligerent FRENADESO, to rival formations on their respective ends of the political spectrum.

In 2005 the Torrijos administration used CONATO and its mostly political hack public employee and company union private sector organizations to privatize Seguro Social and deny tens of thousands of Panamanian workers the chance of ever getting a retirement pension. They then found CONATO fairly useless as a vehicle to mobilized votes for the PRD in the referendum campaign and whip up workers' enthusiasm for a free trade agreement with the United States. Thus the PRD-aligned unions formed the new government-sponsored CUT to replace CONATO as the "voice of labor." A lot of unions are members of both CONATO and CUT, but CONATO and CUT marched in separate contingents. CONATO was pathetically small, just an orange-shirted shell pretending to be the whole labor movement. CUT had by far the largest of the four Mayday parade contingents.

However, marching with both CONATO and CUT there were dissident leftists --- banners in the former's grouping that called for the defeat of the US-Panama Free Trade Agreement despite CONATO's endorsement of that pact, Bolivarian Circles from Colon and people calling for the United States to free five Cubans who are imprisoned for spying on anti-Castro groups in Miami marching with CUT,

On the left-hand side of the equation were the two biggest private sector contingents, the SUNTRACS construction workers union and the Coca-Cola workers. The former is the heart and soul of FRENADESO, the labor/left alliance that arose from the ultimately losing struggle against the Torrijos administration's Seguro Social reforms. But nearly as large as the FRENADESO contingent was a loose conglomeration of leftists who are annoyed with the FRENADESO leadership and have a particular disagreement over whether to mount a leftist electoral effort in 2009. The Coca-Cola workers marched with those leftists who are estranged from FRENADESO.

Here, too, there were unions that were part of FRENADESO but in various degrees alienated from its leaders, people whose unions are with the dissidents but who agree more with FRENADESO and so on. It was hard to tell the revisionists from the deviationists without a program, and even then it depended on which faction's program.

There were conspicuous absences. The man most Panamanians think of when the concept "labor leader" is considered, SUNTRACS secretary general Genaro López, was in Cuba to meet with other Latin American labor activists and plot strategies to defeat free trade agreements with the United States. So was Norma Cano, the leader of the National Workers Center of Panama (CNTP), which is affiliated both with CONATO and CUT but marched with CUT. Despite her being in Cuba, Cano's supporters passed out literature blasting the left: "The tactic of the anarchic organizations is centered on weakening the influence of the PRD, which is the party with the greatest popular influence," she argued, calling for a labor movement "where there's no room for vanguardism and sectarianism."

There was hardly any teacher representation. Colon art teacher Andrés Rodríguez, a leader of the FAM coalition of teachers' unions that was defeated in last year's strike and the main labor/left spokesperson during the 2005 Seguro Social strike, spoke at the FRENADESO rally but the educators were mostly not there. And that supposed rival alliance of teacher unions, CUM, with whom the Torrijos organization signed a contract to set up the FAM strike? They weren't to be seen marching either with CUT or CONATO, because they are a PRD paper creation with no rank-and-file membership, just a cutout for Torrijos to attack the actual teachers' unions.

So what was the general trend, if there was one? After a series of defeats of leftist-led strikes and a series of sellouts by conservative unions aligned with an increasingly oligarchic PRD, many rank-and-file labor activists are looking for alternatives to the previous paradigms. However, nothing has really caught the imagination of the Panamanian working class at this particular moment.

Panama City's street sweepers, who marched with CUT

The artists' union, part of the CUT contingent

Construction workers' kids

Colon neighborhood activists, marching with FRENADESO

 Campesinos against Richard Fifer and his Petaquilla Minerals schemes, marching with FRENADESO

Coca-Cola workers, whose leaders are leftists alienated from FRENADESO

Seguro Social workers who want a leftist political party that FRENADESO doesn't

Thought and Transformative Action (PAT), a campus radical

group that has clashed with the FRENADESO-aligned FER-29

Relatives of those who died from taking poisoned medicines distributed by the

government and who are demanding the resignations of Health Minister Camilo

Alleyne and Seguro Social director René Luciani. They marched with the left

The Autonomous Workers Federation (FAT), which is part

of FRENADESO but annoyed with its leadership of late

Panagringo Vietnam vet José Ponce marched with FRENADESO

A SUNTRACS take on the Free Trade Agreement

An anti-Free Trade Agreement banner in the pro-FTA CONATO contingent

CONATO, decked out in orange shirts, tries to put a brave face on a diminished status

Cheerleading in the CONATO contingent

Cheerleading for FRENADESO

Former professors' union leader Olmedo Beluche, a sociologist who wants to put his

Popular Alternative Party (PAP) on the ballot. In this he's a rival of Priscila Vásquez's

PTP, but like her he's at odds with FRENADESO. Neither party is likely to get on the

ballot in 2009, although PAP is closer to that goal. There is a good chance that either

in an alliance or separately these leftist formations will field independent candidates

Motorcyclists, many of them Panama Canal workers, at the head of the parade

Norma Cano's organization calling for the release of Cuban spies jailed in the USA

Colon's Bolivarian Circles, marching with CUT

Relatives of those who were killed in the 1989 invasion, marching with CUT

FUAR, the Colon campus radicals aligned with FER-29, marching with FRENADESO

Remember the old Moscow-line commies? Those were the Partido del Pueblo and

they're still around, marching with the leftists who don't accept FRENADESO's leadership

Mayday marchers demonstrate trends in Panama's labor movement
Cement wars
The Panama News readership figures

Free Trade Agreement maneuvering in Washington
Business & Economy Briefs