Labor seeks unity where betrayal and division have been the rules

Organized labor and friends meet at the University of Panama. Photo by Eric Jackson

Labor looks for responses to Martinelli's attacks

Seeking unity where betrayal and division have been the rules
by Eric Jackson

Ricardo Martinelli pulled a fast one with Law 177, catching a lot of people and organizations off guard by flying out of the country and having his minions jam the "9-in-1" law though the legislative process in four days. But emphasize "a lot of people and organizations" here --- we will start to see the scope of how offensive it was when the next credible polls come out, but lots of toes were stepped on and the administration and its legislators made new enemies.

To organized labor, however, Ricardo Martinelli is not a "new" enemy. His Super 99 grocery stores are non-union, anti-union outfits. When he was director of the Social Security Fund for the Pérez Balladares administration Martinelli showed that rabiblanco trait of treating professionals who knew the subjects at hand far better than he did as if they were domestic servants to be seen and not heard. When he served the Moscoso government as Minister of Canal Affairs the PanCanal unions accused him of "administrative terrorism." With the PRD having voided the possibility of tens of thousands of working class Panamanians ever getting a Social Security retirement pension, pumped up servile company "unions" and unleashed murderous thugs against labor militants, Martinelli got something of a free pass from organized labor. Only the PRD-aligned labor formations --- most of which had well-paid leaders and hardly any rank-and-file members --- felt any compulsion to take a stand against Martinelli's known anti-labor attitudes in the 2009 elections.

On paper, Panama's labor movement is distributed between the National Council of Organized Workers (CONATO), whose unions have a bit more than 120,000 workers on their rolls; and the National Union of Labor Union Unity (CONUSI), with a bit more than 50,000 members. There are also a number of independent unions and associations, some of which are important in the public sector. The greater part of CONATO's membership, however, is the National Federation of Public Servants (FENASEP), essentially a PRD front group that has never actually done any of the things that a real union does to defend its members' interests. The larger part of CONUSI is the militant SUNTRACS construction workers' union, whose membership has declined a bit in recent years with the collapse of the upper end of the real estate market, the government's strategy of hiring company union contractors for public works projects and brutal repression that has taken the lives of several of the union's members.

Removing a layer of pretension and adding factors of friends, there are two often-feuding labor/left umbrella groups, the larger National Front for the Defense of Economic and Social Rights (FRENADESO) and the smaller United Popular Independent Struggle (ULIP). Although it may be oversimplifying a bit, at the resepctive cores of these alliances there are old rival communist parties, the November 29th National Liberation Movement (MLN-29) in FRENADESO and the Partido del Pueblo in ULIP. It's a profound split that goes back to the early 60s, when Floyd Britton led a militant faction out of the Partido del Pueblo, then deepened during the 21-year dictatorship, when the Partido del Pueblo joined forces with Generals Torrijos and Noriega while the MLN-29 fought an underground and often armed struggle against the government. The present day FRENADESO and ULIP were together for the strikes against the cutbacks in and partial privatization of the Social Security Fund, but that movement was in the end wracked by divisions that were exploited by the Torrijos administration, which used the nurses union's betrayal and the selection of various company union racketeers and leaders without followings to eject FRENADESO from the "negotiating" process and secure a "labor endorsement" for the deeply unpopular reforms.

On that landscape, then, came legislation that, among other things, bans the deduction of union dues from workers' paychecks. (Martinelli was conveniently out of the country to avoid anyone asking him to justify that in light of his own party's deduction of Cambio Democratico dues from IDAAN water and sewer utility workers' paychecks when his party held that public institution as its fiefdom during the Moscoso regime.)

Law 177 also provides that employers can hire strikebreakers in the event of any labor walkout, mandates the sending of police to protect strikebreakers and employers but nobody else in any strike, and effectively arranges things so that any cop who kills a union member on a picket line or tortures a union member to death at a police station will face neither prison nor discipline within the police force.

That attack on organized labor having been pushed through, in a package with anti-environmental legislation that was so offensive that even Panama's main business organizations objected to it, labor was left in a precarious situation but with many potential allies.

CONATO as such limited its activities to declarations against Law 177, with the company union leaders and other racketeers maintaining their silence, FENASEP's voice in the National Assembly (and Social Security privatization engineer) Leandro Ávila fuming, some of its more legitimate leaders calling for a one-day general strike to protest. However, many rank-and-file CONATO union members joined the street protests outside the legislature. Moreover, some CONATO unions and labor leaders are affiliated with ULIP, which is solidly against Martinelli's law.

Law 177 was passed on third and final reading on Saturday, June 12, and that afternoon FRENADESO put out a call for a meeting of all concerned about the matter at the University of Panama's Dolores Moscote Auditorium on the following Monday at 5 p.m.

As people began to file into the room for that meeting, it was an overwhelmingly working class crowd, sprinkled with professionals. FRENADESO people were by and large running the meeting, but with a more factionally neutral teachers' union leader as chair and spokesman and people mostly unidentified with FRENADESO at the long table beside the podium. Where was ULIP? They came marching in, along with some students affiliated with FRENADESO, a few minutes after the meeting got underway.

From one of the teachers the meeting heard the distilled keynote: "Let's not give the president a blank check to do whatever he wants."

Captain Mario Wilson of the National Union of Commercial Airline Pilots (UNPAC) explained that his union had worked very hard to hammer out the details of those provisions of Law 177 pertaining to aviation and considers them to be important advances for the airline industry, its workers and its passengers. But he complained that it got lumped in with other disparate laws that negatively affect all Panamanians, including UNPAC members. Each distinct part of the law should have gone before the particular committee with jurisdiction over its content, he argued. Beyond the procedural irregularities, Wilson complained, there is bad intent: "They want to drown unions' freedom." About pilots who would take the benefits that UNPAC negotiates and not pay dues, he said that such free riding is unfair. "We, as a union, repudiate the labor sections. In 43 years as a union, we have never seen such an attack on the labor movement."

There followed representatives of the Seguro Social doctors, public school teachers, Cable & Wireless employees, University of Panama workers, campesinos resisting displacement by mines or hydroelectric dams, Seguro Social non/medical workers, environmentalists, electric company workers, the National Coordinator of Indigenous Peoples, the Convergencia Sindical labor federation, the Isthmian Federation of Organized Workers (FITO). Seen in the crowd were the mothers of slain SUNTRACS members, the radical priest Conrado Sanjur, members of Panama Canal unions, journalists who have lost their jobs for pro-labor reporting and prominent environmentalists. The different unions and groups spoke of their specific grievances and concerns, and many of the other organizations that were present in the the room did not address the meeting but supported what was going on by their presence.

Speaking for ULIP was Juan Ramón Herrera of the Veraguas Educators Association (AEVE), who referred to Law 177 as "macabre legislation." Calling for unity "in action, and conversation," he said that "We are disposed to do battle for the entire repeal of this law."

"They have tried to discredit us, they have tried to kill us, they have tried to defeat us, and they can't," Herrera said. "Martinelli has only the media power that he can buy, but no organization behind him," he added. Calling for labor activists to "lose the fear of jail," he called for marches and picket lines. "We have to pay our dues for democracy in this country."

On the FRENADESO side, the number two leader at SUNTRACS, Saúl Méndez, concurred. He called for "unity in the streets, where they can count us." He urged union members to turn out for the environmentalists' protests, and those of indigenous people marching toward the capital from the comarcas.

How well FRENADESO can work with other factions has long been a big question, and some of the rival groups and leaders in the labor movement answered part of that by their absence and their failure to call any unity meetings of their own. But in spite of the absent CONATO leaders, there were leaders and members of unions that are part of CONATO in the room and to them, Méndez called for unity at the rank-and-file level and warned against letting Martinelli choose "the leaders of the leaders" with whom he will negotiate. He called the Martinelli administration and the PRD "the same garbage" and called for workers across the old divides to know where their interests lie and look for a way out of the current situation.

At the end, the meeting called for a June 17 march on the Presidencia, called for people to participate in the environmentalists and indigenous marches and support the Colegio de Abogados legal challenge to Law 177, and declared a boycott of Super 99 supermarkets and Hermanos Varela liquors. By consensus, those in the room adopted a list of demands that includes the repeal of Law 177 and the legislation criminalizing protests that block the streets, an end to the displacement of rural communities for development projects, and a halt to the construction of military bases.

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