editorial

Company unions, company towns, even a company church?

What kind of union allows its workers to go down into a muddy pit, the sides of which have not been properly shored up with sufficient retaining walls?

A union that's controlled by the company will do that, but a real union rarely will.

Yes, the burning issue that has SUNTRACS out on the streets is workplace safety and it's a matter of life and death to working men and women. But the underlying and overarching labor issue of the day is the attempt by the Torrijos administration, in alliance with many employers, to smash the labor movement by substituting company unions for real unions.

The offensive against SUNTRACS is particularly noteworthy, and with the stakes so high and that union so historically militant there is no question that it will fight back.

The company union for Grupo Corcione let four of the workers that it purportedly represented --- but didn't represent, because it represented Mr. Corcione Pérez Balladares et al in the company management rather than the workers --- die in an inexcusable accident at a blatantly unsafe workplace. Such are the wages of company unionism.

On Isla Viveros, a Colombian developer who has already been slapped on the wrist for destroying several precolumbian archaeological sites has tried to break SUNTRACS by bringing in a subcontractor with a company union and armed goons. He then issued a public threat that if SUNTRACS isn't removed from the area --- although most of them live there --- five or ten people will be killed. So what does the Torrijos administration do in the face of this Colombian death squad threat? It sends in the police to support the developer who would Colombianize our business culture.

In an overt fraud against the creditors of Máximo Haddad's insolvent and sleazy PYCSA consortium, the Torrijos administration allowed the transfer of PYCSA's biggest asset, the concession for a Panama to Colon autopista, to the Brazilian construction giant Odebrecht. The court appointed receiver for PYCSA was and still is excluded, with Torrijos and the former Dignity Battalion commander thus ratifying the taking of part of the Metropolitan Natural Park without compensation and other abuses by Haddad notwithstanding the law. Now, lo and behold, Odebrecht, which was at the center of a bid rigging scandal that forced a Brazilian president's ouster, plans to use a company union for the work in that illegally obtained concession.

It's reasonable to expect that the Torrijos administration will do its utmost to make the canal expansion a company union job.

Company unions aren't the present administration's only attempted enhancement of corporate power. Torrijos is also promoting company towns.

It was bad enough that Torrijos did advertising photos with Petaquilla promoter Richard Fifer when the latter was (and as far as we know still is) facing charges of embezzling public funds while governor of Cocle province. It was worse that Torrijos continued to support Fifer when Petaquilla made false statements about the existence of those charges on the Canadian SEDAR stock exchange information website, so as to fraudulently prop up the value of the company's stock. Worse yet, Torrijos has continued to support Petaquilla while the latter has been flouting the nation's environmental laws.

Now Fifer's Petaquilla has gated off a number of communities near its gold mining project, with the first people denied access to those long-existing communities being activists from the moderate environmentalist group ANCON. In a traditional company town, the company at least builds the town. Here Torrijos is allowing Fifer to seize other people's communities by blocking access to them.

What could be worse?

Well, the Catholic Church has a right to accept or excommunicate whomever it wants, and take whatever position it wants on the controversial issues of the day. The Holy See is a "divine right" monarchy headed by a man whose formative years were spent in the Hitler Youth, so one would expect it to have some right-wing views. Panama does have freedom of religion, especially for Catholics.

The Catholic bishop of Colon has, under both church and national law, every right to ban protests against Petaquilla on church property, as he has done. And the people of the area also have every right to complain that their church has allied itself with corrupt politicians and rogue corporations, supporting yet another white man's land grab like they did 500 years ago in the Spanish Conquest.

Now if the Catholic hierarchy feels the need to be a sordid company church, fine --- but let us not hear them to then complain about how unfair it is when dissident movements and other denominations attract believers away from them. It's a long way from rendering unto Caesar that which is Caesar's to rendering unto Richard Fifer that which belongs to the long-time residents of northern Cocle and western Colon provinces.

Get past the semantics and create longer-term visas

Tourism Minister Rubén Blades has his reasonable legal and jurisdictional argument --- reasonable, but far from air-tight --- that people who stay here for four, five or six months a year are not tourists.

Well, OK. Call people and phenomena what you will.

However, unless Panama wants to lose the business of the "snowbirds" from Canada and the northern USA who like to winter here, and unless the government intends to make it difficult for retirees thinking of moving down here to make a reasonable search for a new home, we need something longer than the current 30-day visa that can be extended to 90 days.

Our legislature and executive branch are notorious for doing things without considering the consequences, and in fact jamming new laws and treaties through the process without even reading them, let alone consulting with those who would be affected. That's what they did when they shortened tourist visa stays as part of a demogogic emergency crime bill.

It would be best to treat that as water under the bridge, and create a new status for longer-term foreign visitors so as to protect some valuable existing niches in the Panamanian economy.

In the best of all worlds the government would take up an entire review and reform of the nation's immigration laws. Sadly, were that to happen with the present administration and legislature all sorts of ugly prejudices would come to the surface, all sorts of impractical ideas would be advanced and the most important of the real problems would never be addressed. At least, that has been the tenor of the discussion when the subject of general immigration reform has been broached by politicians during the Torrijos years.

Leave it for a few years to address comprehensive immigration reform, then. But as soon as the legislature gets back into session they should act create a new status, in order to keep up from losing part of our national income in a big way starting with the next dry season.

Bear in mind...

But it was impossible to save the Great Republic. She was rotten to the heart. Lust of conquest had long ago done its work; trampling upon the helpless abroad had taught her, by a natural process, to endure with apathy the like at home; multitudes who had applauded the crushing of other people's liberties, lived to suffer for their mistake in their own persons. The government was irrevocably in the hands of the prodigiously rich and their hangers-on; the suffrage was become a mere machine, which they used as they chose. There was no principle but commercialism, no patriotism but of the pocket.

Mark Twain

You can teach someone who cares to write columns, but you can’t teach someone who writes columns to care.

Ellen Goodman

Wars are seldom caused by spontaneous hatreds between people, for peoples in general are too ignorant of one another to have grievances and too indifferent to what goes on beyond their borders to plan conquests. They must be urged to the slaughter by politicians who know how to alarm them.

H.L. Mencken