Labor on the march toward a national strike

Editor's update: At the August 23 meeting a one day warning strike was called for September 4.

Yes, SUNTRACS is a union with 56,000 dues-paying members.
It's also something of a working class youth movement.

"Let's have an orderly disorder!"
article and photos by Eric Jackson

On August 14 the labor movement --- except for the PRD-aligned organizations and company unions --- took to the streets, along with many of their allies. It was an impressive show, but not as big as the marches during the Seguro Social privatization strike. Nor was there as enthusiastic cheering from the balconies and bystanders along the parade route. The big absences that were there over Seguro Social but not this time were delegations from professional associations and the public sector nurses (whose union was the key defector that, at the urging of the Catholic Chuch, sided with the PRD to support the investment of the Social Security Fund in rabiblanco-run banks and corporations). The element that was present this time but not previously was a delegation of city bus drivers, albeit only a few dozen.

Thus the unions and other groups, mostly in two labor / left umbrella groups, the larger FRENADESO and the growing ULIP, decided to continue with the national strike movement but not to call for an immediate national labor stoppage. On Saturday, August 23 a vote is to be taken about when and on what terms to call a national strike.

The march was led by COMENENAL, the alliance of Seguro Social and Ministry of Health physicians' organization that defeated the Torrijos administration in a 39-day strike, breaking the government's long winning streak against the labor movement.

The biggest contingents were the SUNTRACS construction workers' union and a teachers' delegation from the profession's various organizations. (No, the PRD's mostly on paper teachers' front organization, CUM, wasn't there.)

The key issue is the decline in workers' living standards, with a loss of about 20 percent of purchasing power in the past year or so swelling the number of homeless people sleeping on the streets notwithstanding an increase in formal employment. The unions are demanding an across-the-board general wage increase (which most business groups and most of the mainstream media treat as extremely toxic but about which the government is willing to talk) and a freeze on the prices of rice and a number of other household staples.

The doctors and Seguro Social workers place a high priority on opposing the unification of the Ministry of Health and Social Security health systems, which they say will bankrupt the Social Security Fund and lead to privatization.

The metro area bus drivers, independent owner operators, have been repeatedly threatened with being put out of business by a succession of so far unsuccessful Torrijos administration plans to transfer the bus industry from the existing small businesses to one or two large companies. The system of bus syndicates, always something of a mafia operation, has broken down to the point that there is no negotiating partner for the government --- the ones the PRD wants to talk to can't get the rank-and-file to recognize their authority, and the ones that are beginning to emerge from the shattered old organizations the government hesitates to recognize. In a national strike movement the bus drivers are the wild card --- if a large part of them withhold their services, the rest of the economy, with the exception of the canal, grinds to a halt. But the small business owners in the bus industry and the labor unions have rarely seen eye to eye.

The various student radical groups were in the march. So were a bunch of young men who might or might not have jobs, including some gang members who tend to look up to SUNTRACS as the largest and most daring gang of them all when it comes to confronting the police. SUNTRACS, however, tends to be annoyed with the lack of discipline among some of these young men, and in the course of the march this tension expressed itself when some people marching with SUNTRACS were drinking beer in the march. The boom truck playing the radical hip hop anthems paused, and a union leader got on the microphone to call for order. "We're not a bunch of drunks --- let's have an orderly disorder!"

Look for a national strike, probably in early September.

The teachers turn the corner from Avenida Peru onto Via España