business & economy

It's not possible to precisely gauge the state of this country's labor movement, let alone of the Panamanian working class, on the basis of how many people show up in which contingents at the Mayday parades. Nevertheless, these things do have stories to tell, especially when one can put them into the context of what else has been happening in society and its labor relations.

In an attempt to garner Democratic votes in the US Congress for a US - Panama Free Trade Agreement, the ruling Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD) has been playing up its international Social Democratic ties. But in the last year and one-half the Torrijos regime has, directly or through its allies slain three unarmed members of the SUNTRACS construction workers union and arrested more than one thousand of that union's members; lost a bitter 39-day strike to the nation's public health care sector doctors (spending an enormous amount of money on anti-labor propaganda in the process); through its puppet company unions agreed to a minimum wage adjustment that didn't come remotely close to keeping up with inflation; overseen a skyrocketing cost of living; denied benefits to the families of hundreds of working people whom its health care system poisoned to death with tainted cough syrup by denying funds for the needed toxicology tests and then declaring that without positive tests the poisonings didn't happen; stalled on government recognition of unions that had gone through all the proper steps to organize workplaces; presided over a huge increase in the cost of living; and allowed the streets, schools and other facilities in working class neighborhoods to go unmaintained.

The litany could go on, but suffice to say that even if the more credulous or duplicitous elements of the AFL-CIO might be portraying the Panamanian government as labor-friendly on Capitol Hill in Washington, here in Panama there is a general sense that our present government has nothing much to offer working people. That's reflected in a polarization of the labor movement, with the left picking up strength after a string of demoralizing defeats in 2005 and 2006 and the members of the PRD-aligned unions largely embarrassed to show their faces at a Mayday gathering.

Last year, the government-backed CUT had a large contingent and there were groups passing out literature proclaiming the PRD as the party of the Panamanian working class. CUT had a tiny presence this year and there was no pro-PRD literature to be seen.

As was the case last year, the left has divided and that division has since taken on organizational form with the formation of Unidad de Lucha Integral por el Pueblo (Unity of the Integral Struggle for the People, or ULIP) as a rival labor and left umbrella group to the National Front for the Defense of Economic and Social Rights (FRENADESO). The biggest labor organizations in FRENADESO are the SUNTRACS construction workers's union and ASOPROF, a teachers' union; while the biggest ULIP unions are AEVE, the Veraguas teachers' union, and the Coca-Cola workers' SITRAFCOREBGASCELIS.

In 2008 ULIP had a contingent nearly as large as that of the collection of conservative and mostly government-aligned organizations that assembled on Avenida Central near the Don Bosco Basilica, and FRENADESO's crowd was bigger than ULIP's and the other unions' combined turnout. While ULIP had its campus radical groups and political organizations in the mix, the range of student, community, political and issue-oriented groups that marched with FRENADESO was much larger and SUNTRACS was by far the best represented union of the day.

The polarization of the labor movement toward the left sketched out by participation in the Mayday parade is a reflection of increased labor militancy and an alienation of the working class from the government and that part of the labor movement that supports it.

The divisions within the militant part of the labor movement have FRENADESO urging a 2009 election boycott and ULIP favoring independent labor participation in the electoral process but not strong enough to get a labor / left party on the ballot to do so. Within Panamanian society in general, there is a parallel division among those who are for a host of reasons fed up with the government but divided about whether blocking the roads is a sensible way to vent grievances.