business & economy

Choice insults as the bulk of the SUNTRACS crowd, about a half
a block back, marches past the legislature.  Photo by Eric Jackson

 

SUNTRACS leaders re-elected, but some tough problems won't go away

What's a militant construction workers' union to do?

by Eric Jackson

 

The Sindicato Unico de Trabajadores de la Construccion y Similares (SUNTRACS) is one of the few private sector labor unions that matters in Panama. The Coca-Cola workers and the people who toil in Chiquita's banana fields are also unionized in name and fact, there are some other genuine but relatively small unions and then there are a plethora of company-controlled unions. Those Panamanian working men and women who are employed by private capitalists and would like to see their rights and interests defended by an organization of their peers are usually out of luck.

 

But Panama has a hot construction industry, the only real union in it is as militant as can be and the president of Panama is continuing an old feud that his father had with a left to which the leaders of SUNTRACS belong. Thus SUNTRACS is challenged by a hostile government on several fronts, from a Ministry of Labor Development that won't readily recognize it as a bargaining agent despite what the labor laws might say, to employers directly or indirectly creating company unions as an alternative, to criminal charges against SUNTRACS leaders, to mass arrests, to National Police who have shot and killed two of its members and stayed away from a tense picket line so that goons from the government-hired Brazilian company Norberto Odebrecht SA could kill another.

 

(Do you want to believe an English-language website whose first advertiser was a company that includes the gangster who personally delivered Richard Nixon's hush money to the Watergate burglars? Do you want to believe the National Police propaganda statements? Then you will probably say, despite the word of witnesses, medical examiners and prosecutors, that in all of these incidents the slain SUNTRACS members were armed or were in the process of physically attacking somebody. And Hitler said that World War II started because Jews incited Poles to attack a radio station in Germany, too.)

 

There was an opposition slate in the SUNTRACS election, which in its campaign literature said that it was as militant as the current leadership. However, in the March 6 elections only a few members voted to put a new generation in charge. Photo by Eric Jackson

 

Not only are the cops killing SUNTRACS members, but after their last killing, despite the murder charge brought by prosecutors against a National Police sergeant, the next day in Curundu gangland fashion President Torrijos sent in the police to twice raid the home of slain union activist Al Iromi Smith's mother, Rosaura Rentería, and break up the wake. (On an attempt to make a third raid that day Martín's cops were met with sniper fire from the neighbors.) To further emphasize the point that it's now a crime to be the mother of an unarmed man murdered by a Torrijista goon while at a hospital entrance seeking medical attention, Rentería has been fired from her government job with the Colon provincial night court.

 

Between SUNTRACS and President Torrijos. Photo by Eric Jackson

Meanwhile a criminal case wherein a petty hoodlum with a long record of convictions alleges that the number two SUNTRACS leader, Saúl Méndez, plotted to create a shooting incident that never materialized plods through the courts.

Marching the usual route, up Avenida Peru to Via España, then down that street until it turns into Avenida Central, through the pedestrian mall to the Casco Viejo and up to the fence a block from the Palacio de las Garzas. Photo by Eric Jackson

 

Now Marcos Allen, an unsuccessful Liberal candidate for legislator who used to participate in Colon protests demanding make-work jobs for the unemployed but has now gone on to more potentially lucrative things, has organized the Coordinadora Nacional Democratica de Sindicatos de la Construccion (Conadesinco) to unify various company unions and challenge the SUNTRACS position as the only significant union in the construction industry. The immediate goal is for Allen to replace SUNTRACS Genaro Lopez at the bargaining table the next time the Panamanian Chamber of Construction (CAPAC) sits down to negotiate a new master labor agreement.

 

The government-recognized and mostly PRD-aligned CONATO labor federation, which expelled SUNTRACS and other militant unions in 2007, is expected to endorse Allen's new project. CAPAC, which like SUNTRACS is keenly aware of who controls what, how much the market will bear and what the relationship of forces between labor and management is at any given time, is on the other hand unlikely to bargain with Allen as some sort of ideological statement if Allen can't call or settle a national construction strike as SUNTRACS can presently do.

 

Within the labor movement the biggest real challenge that SUNTRACS faces is from the left. Marching from Parque Porras to the Presidencia from time to time and fighting pitched battles in the streets and around construction sites is being ever more criticized by leaders of other unions as an inadequate approach to the problems that the government is creating for the labor movement. About the SUNTRACS leaders' rejection of electoral politics, members of the Coca-Cola workers' union made the argument in unsigned leaflets that said, in part that "the imbecile doesn't know that of his political ignorance is born the prostitute, the abandoned child and the worst of all bandits, the crooked politician...."

 

But SUNTRACS secretary general Genaro Lopez, who in a meeting at the Hosanna Temple was declared the overwhelming winner along with his slate of the March 6 union election, insists that right now the political system is too badly rigged. His argument is that the only thing organized labor could gain from participating in elections would be a few minor offices and that the foreseeable internal struggles over who gets them and the diversion of energy and resources make the idea unworthy.