opinion

 

Different standards for physicians and bricklayers

by Eric Jackson

The mainstream news media here are related by blood, marriage and mostly undisclosed business deals with the ad cartel, about a dozen ad agencies run mostly by members of the usual families with illustrious surnames that have dominated Panama since the days of Pedrarias the Cruel. We see how the members of that social sector, and how the key employees of their businesses, tend to live --- waving it in everybody's face seems to be part of what being a rabiblanco is all about for most of these people.

Achilles and his vulnerable heel was thus far better protected from life's slings and arrows than when the oligarchy's media start to complain about organized labor. In recent days we have seen amazing double standards, such that only those who are already implacable enemies of working people and their unions wouldn't recognize them.

Nobody hides the fact about what Genaro López, the top leader of the SUNTRACS construction workers' union is. "I try to be a good communist," López declares. Of course, in the wake of a 20th century in which Vietnam's communists were mortal enemies of Cambodia's Khmer Rouge, Peru's Sendero Luminoso and Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement would have shootouts, China had a cultural revolution, Tito broke with Stalin and was denounced by the Albanian communists for doing so and so on, just what "communist" means is disputed, and even more so what it is to be a "good communist."

One strain of the definition, so it seems with SUNTRACS, is that leaders get paid like other skilled workers.

And so when La Prensa did their huge "exposé" of SUNTRACS and this country's other leftist unions, they revealed that Genaro López, a bricklayer by trade who has led a union of some 50,000 members for 17 years, brings home a whopping monthly salary of --- $710. "Even though he doesn't work in construction," the horrified PRD-leaning voice of Panama's business elite declared. On top of that, he gets a $900 expense account, on which he has traveled to Cuba and Argentina this year.

Wow! --- I guess that the social set that tools around town in BMWs and considers it obligatory to take their kids to Disney World must be absolutely shocked at this big-spending frivolity.

They certainly don't like the idea of FRENADESO having a foundation with a starting capital of $5 million, as La Prensa reports it will have --- maybe $50 for each member of a union affiliated with the labor / left umbrella group.

And then there are those outrageous doctors, who with all the overtime that a lot of them work, bring home an average of around $2,430 per month, if you are to believe the government's numbers. How dare they demand a pay raise that keeps them up with the cost of living, and a bit more if they can get it!

But you know, these are real doctors, who studied quite rigorously for years and then went through gruelling internships and residencies. They don't make half of what the University of Panama's rector, whose doctorate is fake, brings home. Oh, but La Prensa isn't going to gripe about that --- the Rector Magnifico is, after all, PRD.

The president himself has briefly interrupted his globe-trotting to denounce the physicians for their unreasonable demands.

Right --- take it from a guy who spends $71 grand a day in public funds on ads to promote his personal image.

So are the nation's parasitic political class and its business elite going to incite Juan Q. Público to be jealous of unionized construction workers and doctors who make more than he does? Well, just because the people who run this country are well paid doesn't mean that they're very smart.