Murders of trade unionists go unpunished in Colombia
This from an Economic Snapshot from the Economic Policy Institute is by Tony Avirgan:Colombia is the most dangerous country in the world for trade unionists. Over the past 21 years, more than 2,534 unionists have been assassinated. (The Escuela Nacional Sindical has documented 2,534 assassinations but says there are surely more that have not been reported.)
President Alvaro Uribe was elected in 2002 and again in 2006 promising a crackdown on violence. His policies have resulted in a decrease in guerrilla violence, but there has been an increase in extrajudicial executions perpetrated by right-wing death squads and security forces (Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA) news release, October 18, 2007). Assassinations of trade unionists have decreased, but so have prosecutions of the assassins. For the past two years, none of the killers of trade unionists has been brought to trial in Colombia.
Now, despite public outcry over these appalling human rights abuses and the firm opposition of U.S. and Colombian unions, the Bush administration is seeking to reward Uribe with a free-trade agreement.
Luciano Vasquez, Director General of the Escuela Nacional Sindical, will address these issues at a Global Policy Network forum on Wednesday, February 27th. Click here for further information and to RSVP.
See also several articles from Dollars & Sense about the dangers of organizing in the palm oil, cut flower, and bottled beverage industries in Colombia: Blood on the Palms, Oil-Palm Plantations on Afro-Colombian Lands, Stop Killer Coke!, Some Roses Don't Smell So Sweet, and "Organizing Rural Labor in Colombia" (D&S November/December 2006, available only in the print edition).
Labels: assassinations, Colombia, unions, Uribe, US-Colombian Free Trade Agreement
Naomi Klein at Firedoglake
The discussion appears to be over, but earlier today Naomi Klein was fielding questions about her new book at the weekly Firedoglake book salon.What is the shock doctrine? Klein explains:
I started researching the free market's dependence on the power of shock four years ago, during the early days of the occupation of Iraq. I reported from Baghdad on Washington's failed attempts to follow "shock and awe" with shock therapy - mass privatisation, complete free trade, a 15% flat tax, a dramatically downsized government. Afterwards I travelled to Sri Lanka, several months after the devastating 2004 tsunami, and witnessed another version of the same manoeuvre: foreign investors and international lenders had teamed up to use the atmosphere of panic to hand the entire beautiful coastline over to entrepreneurs who quickly built large resorts, blocking hundreds of thousands of fishing people from rebuilding their villages. By the time Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, it was clear that this was now the preferred method of advancing corporate goals: using moments of collective trauma to engage in radical social and economic engineering.We haven't been using Klein's terminology, but disaster capitalism should be a familiar concept to readers of Dollars & Sense. In "Fisherfolk Out, Tourists In" (July/August 2005), for example, Vasuki Nesiah wrote:
Most people who survive a disaster want the opposite of a clean slate: they want to salvage whatever they can and begin repairing what was not destroyed. "When I rebuild the city I feel like I'm rebuilding myself," said Cassandra Andrews, a resident of New Orleans' heavily damaged Lower Ninth Ward, as she cleared away debris after the storm. But disaster capitalists have no interest in repairing what once was. In Iraq, Sri Lanka and New Orleans, the process deceptively called "reconstruction" began with finishing the job of the original disaster by erasing what was left of the public sphere.
From Thailand to Sri Lanka, the tourist industry saw the tsunami through dollar signs. The governments concerned were on board from the outset, quickly planning massive subsidies for the tourism industry in ways that suggest the most adverse distributive impact. Infrastructure development will be even further skewed to cater to the industry rather than to the needs of local communities. Within weeks of the tsunami, the Alliance for the Protection of National Resources and Human Rights, a Sri Lankan advocacy group, expressed concern that "the developing situation is disastrous, more disastrous than the tsunami itself, if it is possible for anything to be worse than that." ...And I heard similar analysis from local African American activists along the Gulf Coast of Mississippi, following Hurricane Katrina. When I interviewed Derrick Evans of Turkey Creek Community Initiatives (March/April 2006), he said:
Proposals announced by TAFREN [Task Force for Rebuilding the Nation] and by various government officials call for the building of multi-lane highways and the wholesale displacement of entire villages from the coast. Coastal lands are to be sliced up into designated buffer zones and tourism zones. The government is preventing those fishing families who wish to do so from rebuilding their homes on the coast, ostensibly because of the risk of future natural disasters; at the same time, it's encouraging the opening of both new and rebuilt beachfront tourist hotels.
The plans are essentially roadmaps for multinational hotel chains, telecom companies, and the like to cater to the tourism industry. Small-scale fishing operations by individual proprietors will become more difficult to sustain as access to the beach becomes increasingly privatized and fishing conglomerates move in. The environmental deregulation proposed in the PRSP will open the door to even more untrammeled exploitation of natural resources. None of the reconstruction planning is being channeled through decision-making processes that are accountable or participatory. Ultimately, it looks like reconstruction will be determined by the deadly combination of a rapacious private sector and government graft: human tragedy becomes a commercial opportunity, tsunami aid a business venture.
Not unpredictably, even the subsidies planned for the tourism industry in the wake of the tsunami are going to the hotel owners and big tour operators, not to the porters and cleaning women who were casual employees in hotels. Many of the local residents who were proprietors or workers in smaller tourism-related businesses, now unemployed, are not classified as tsunami-affected, so they are denied even the meager compensation they should be entitled to. The situation is much worse for the vast informal sector of sex workers, souvenir sellers, and others whose livelihood depended on the tourism industry. If the tsunami highlighted the acute vulnerability that accompanies financial dependence on the industry, the tsunami reconstruction plans look set to exacerbate this vulnerability even further.
[W]hat you'll find is that the unresolved problems pertaining to any one of those issues can be overlain on a map: that the lowest-lying land is typically where black folks, generations ago, would have acquired their land; where they would have settled and developed their communities, which would have been the least disturbed by 20th-century infrastructure; and that now, in the wake of a "Mississippi miracle"--the economic revitalization of the coast, for example, the advent of dockside casinos--would be the most ripe or prime for redevelopment.David Bacon, writing in this year's Annual Labor Issue, sees similar forces at play in Iraq.
Today, you've got casino- and tourism-driven feudalism, coupled with militarism, constituting much of the local economy. Katrina has probably raised the cachet of the casinos and the military bases even more as the two main mules that are gonna pull us out of this mud. Government contracts for shipbuilding; bigger, wider roads and highways for trucking. Deeper, wider, dredged out shipping lanes for shipping; free trade agreements. Bigger and better casinos with more bells and whistles. More of the same is the economic forecast, because they can't imagine anything else.
President Bush says he wants democracy, yet he will not accept the one political demand that unites Iraqis above all others. They want the country's oil (and its electrical power stations, ports, and other key facilities) to remain in public hands.Perhaps the quickest way to understand how shock plays into all of this is to watch the short film based on Klein's book.
The fact that Iraqi unions are the strongest voice demanding this makes them anathema. Selling the oil off to large corporations is far more important to the Bush administration than a paper commitment to the democratic process....
The occupation has always had an economic agenda. In 2003 and 2004 occupation czar Paul Bremer published lists in Baghdad newspapers of the public enterprises he intended to auction off. Arab labor leader Hacene Djemam bitterly observed, "War makes privatization easy: first you destroy society; then you let the corporations rebuild it."
The Bush administration won't leave Iraq in part because the economic agenda is still insecure.
One Firedoglake commenter asked Klein,
Isn’t shock a funciton of any visionary change, regardless of whether it is left or right? Mao & Pol Pot come to mind. Why, then, is it disaster capitalism rather than disaster transformationalism?Klein replied:
I wrote this book because the far left has been held accountable for the crimes and abuses required to impose its utopian, year-zero fantasies. The far right has not. And when criminals are not held accountable for their crimes, they re-offend. It’s worth remembering that Paul Bremer was Kissinger’s right hand man during the coup in Chile in 1973.In today's discussion, Klein emphasized nonetheless that market forces are not all powerful and that, in fact, we are at an important turning point.
The so-called “free market” is in crisis today - we see it with sub-prime, a s well as with the massive disillusionment with the Bush Administration. Even Greenspan warns in his book that people are losing faith in market fundamentalism.
This is a moment for the left/progressives to propose our vision with real confidence and without apologies. We shouldn’t be afraid to be angry at grotesque injustice, and we need to stop being apologetic about believing in universal human rights and universal health care.
Labels: Books, Disaster Capitalism, firedoglake, Gulf Coast, Iraq, katrina, mississippi, Naomi Klein, oil, sri lanka, tsunami, unions
The Dull Compulsion of the Economic (#11)
A series of blog entries by D&S collective member Larry Peterson.With all the turmoil on the markets over the past week, a bit of attention has been diverted from the labor unrest taking place in France. Last Thursday, transport, electricity and gas unions led a one-day strike against the new Sarkozy government's attempts to pare back so-called "special regimes" for public sector pensions. These arrangements allow workers in these sectors to retire at a much lower age than is the norm in the private sphere, as well as other privileges not generally available to other workers. Though the response of other unions was enthusiastic (teachers and others joined in, and the electricity workers actually switched off the power going to Sarkozy's own private residence), many commentators were quick to discourage any comparison to the mass strikes of 1996, which toppled the government at the time. Today's strikes, crowed The Economist ("Sarkozy's Bad Week," October 20th), are "not justified " according to a poll in Le Figaro. The same poll reported 59% as saying that the unions were defending their special interests, not protecting social benefits in general. The public has thus shifted against the strikers, and now sees the pension perks as unfair. Such a switch should give Mr. Sarkozy the popular support he needs to stick to his guns."
But there may be more here than just "the last gasp of a union movement that faces a changed political outlook in France" (The Economist again). The Financial Times, in its coverage of the strike ("French Strikers Test Sarkozy," October 18th), quoted a teacher marching in Paris who said that Sarkozy was "trying to pit private sector workers who do not have special pension privileges against those who do. Even if this does not directly concern us, we have to show our solidarity. If not, the government will just keep increasing the number of years we have to work." Her remarks, noted the FT, amplified those of union leader Bernard Thibault, who expressed the belief that workers throughout the economy were being made the scapegoats for the France's economic troubles. This is a sentiment that has been growing in France. As I wrote during the strikes of March, 2006, workers in France are becoming "resistant to gamble away any security they still enjoy every time the bosses and politicians can point to a nonperforming economic indicator." And though I have been critical of U.S. unions' tunnel vision in their quest to secure their retirees' benefits (ceasing to call for the same benefits and pay for new workers, so as to ensure older ones and retirees are paid off, etc.)—benefits that were, after all, were promised by employers themselves—it is equally important not to let governments and employers divide the labor movement with talk of exclusion and privileges. And a timely article in the Guardian tells us why.
In his piece "The Slow Death of the Real Job is Pulling Us Apart" (The Guardian, October 19th), columnist John Harris shows that in Britain—so often considered a model for France regarding labor market reforms—the issue is not whether or not a privileged group of workers is sapping the energy of the economy by wasting its resources and denying others both opportunity and security; instead, all workers are feeling downward pressure on their living standards as protections are eroded. He says: "a few months ago I spoke to a manufacturing employee from the West Midlands who works in a factory producing car parts. Three years ago, the bosses began the recruitment of a new kind of worker. A dwindling number of long-standing staff were on 11 [pounds] an hour; the new arrivals—many of whom barely knew what they were doing—worked 12 hour days for 4 [pounds] an hour less, had none of the usual entitlements to paid holidays or sick leave, and were seemingly arriving and leaving through a revolving door. Within 18 months, for every "core" worker, there were two supplied by the agencies, many of whom were from Poland, Cameroon or Senegal. The walls were quickly smattered with racist graffiti and the level of scrap increased fast. Under union pressure, the company relented and proposed a scheme whereby long-standing agency workers could eventually join the accredited workforce, and, in its wake, the rancorous atmosphere began to improve."
But one settlement does not mean the overall trend is any rosier. Accordingly, Harris goes on: "these people were lucky. Trade unionists cite no end of altogether bleaker case studies: three-tier workplaces in which indigenous British employees sit precariously at the top, flimsily employed Poles come further down, and thoroughly casualized Hungarians and Slovakians are left fighting at the bottom...On the stories go: meat-processing workers in Monmouthshire threatened with redundancy unless they downgraded to agency terms, and then fired."
But it is a comment that Harris makes before embarking on this pitiful recital that I think is useful to cite in opposition to the Sarkozys and all the others who attempt to pit workers at each others throats (for increasingly paltry spoils). For, as the British workforce is in fact being segmented—not so much by any privileges that might accrue to them as mere protection from blatant, and often-times illegal exploitation on account of their status as full citizens (protection which is itself eroded as wage pressure continues to be brought on them by the growing employment of those with less protection, thereby lessening native workers' wage-bargaining position, and, eventually, even employability) with more access to the law courts, media or publicity, what are the politicians talking about? Harris provides a withering answer: the political class is "blithely yakking about 'rising expectations,' while millions of people's hopes are plummeting at speed." Now this is truly an example of division and special interests workers should pay attention to.
Up against the charros and the changarros
Mexico's independent unions confront a wave of lousy jobs
Chris Tilly and Marie Kennedy
May 9, 2007
This is the fourth in a series of posts by D&S comrades Marie Kennedy and Chris Tilly, who are spending six months in Tlaxcala in central Mexico. Their first posting was about the recent increases in the price of tortillas in Mexico.
[Photo captions: Lower/right-hand photo: Authentic Labor Front (FAT) protesters call for union autonomy, an end to government interference in unions' internal affairs, and support for immigrant workers. (Photo credit: Marie Kennedy.) Upper/left-hand photo: Independent unions and their allies fill the Zócalo, the huge public square in the heart of Mexico City. (Photo credit: Chris Tilly.)]
"We have the best bosses in the world," trumpeted the headlines in the Mexican press upon the release of an international survey earlier this year. Mexicans responding to the survey, carried out by the Kelly Services temp agency, rated their bosses 7.6 out of 10—higher than in any of the other 28 countries in the survey. Mexico came in second (after Denmark) in the level of job satisfaction.
Few satisfied workers were in evidence among the thousands flooding Mexico's cities on May 1st (Labor Day in Mexico and everywhere in the world except the United States, despite the holiday's Chicago origin). In days past, unionists would file politely through Mexico City's Zócalo, holding signs saying "Thank you, Mr. President." In 2007, for the first time in more than 80 years, Mexico's president decided not to attend. Felipe Calderón claimed he didn't want to steal the spotlight away from the workers, but many speculated that his main motivation was to avoid angry labor leaders like Valdemar Gutiérrez. "He has no basis for continuing to call his administration ‘the employment administration'," thundered Gutiérrez, leader of the National Social Security Workers' Union, "when unemployment is rising, the cost of living is going up, the social safety net is being abandoned, and inequality and poverty are exploding!"
Mexican workers have much to be angry about. Despite labor laws that look great on paper and two-plus decades of presidents extolling the virtues of trade liberalization and anti-inflationary measures, job quality has stagnated and in some ways worsened. The charro (cowboy) unions, as critics dub the "official," government-linked labor associations, are trapped in a model left over from Mexico's former one-party state, and deliver little for workers. Independent unions like Gutierrez's seek to chart a different course, but so far their numbers remain small and their impact limited. May 1st in Mexico may have shifted from a ceremonial parade to a cry of protest; it is still far indeed from a celebration of working-class victories.
Laws and realities
On May 1st, we joined up with the contingent of the Authentic Labor Front (FAT), a small (they claim about 1/18 the membership of the charro Mexican Confederation of Labor) but feisty independent union confederation. A sea of union militants in tan t-shirts and red baseball caps converged on the gathering point, near the corner of Lázaro Cárdenas and Articulo 123 in the center of Mexico City. The symbolism of the intersection was potent. Cárdenas was the fiery populist leader of the 1930s who nationalized key industries (notably oil) and fused workers and peasants with the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) via labor law and land reform. Article 123 is Mexico's basic statement of labor rights, enshrined as an article of the Constitution; it opens by stating, "Every person has the right to decent and socially useful work…."
The scope of Mexican labor law can be startling to the casual US observer. Left-wing legal scholar Néstor de Buen recently described the law's requirement of six days of paid vacation after one year as "a miserable amount"; in the United States, of course, the amount required by law is zero. Mexico's labor law also restricts firing and requires a holiday bonus of two weeks' pay, a dozen official holidays, overtime pay, the right to form unions, profit-sharing, provisions for worker health and safety and labor-management committees to address issues of mutual concern such as training. In fact, the law is so strong—on paper—that previous president Vicente Fox (2000-2006) tried unsuccessfully to gut it, and Calderón has promised business he will finish the job.
But two problems prevent this legislation from turning Mexico into a workers' paradise. First, the law is barely enforced. Workers commonly work extra hours, not only without an overtime premium, but without any pay at all; one convenience store employee told us he works an average of four unpaid extra hours a week. Companies dodge the profit-sharing rule by using accounting tricks to declare zero profits, as Volkswagen's extremely successful Mexico division did this year.
From chambas to changarros
An even bigger problem is that increasing numbers of Mexicans fall outside the scope of the law altogether, because instead of having chambas (jobs), they have changarros (self-employment or marginal employment in a kaleidoscopic range of microbusinesses and hustles). Unemployment proper has drifted up from 3.6 to 4 percent since Calderón has taken office. But outright unemployment is not a viable option for most, given that Mexico has no unemployment insurance system. Instead, Mexicans join the ranks of those heading north to the United States (about 500,000 a year) or, in even larger numbers, join the informal economy of changarros. Experts estimate that today about 26 million of Mexico's 41 million workers labor without legally required benefits (including social security) or an employment contract. Even in the industrial powerhouse city of Puebla, Rita Amador, head of the union of vendors at the informal Hidalgo Market, reports that unemployed job seekers have increased the group's ranks by ten percent in the last year alone. Over the last four presidential terms, the percentage of workers without benefits soared from 25 percent to 63 percent.
The benefits gap offers one window on how appallingly bad most Mexican jobs are. There are many others. Even among benefited workers the percentage who are temporary has leaped from 8 percent in 1997 to 18 percent in 2006. Prominent labor lawyer Arturo Alcalde states that of workers fired or laid off in Mexico, four out of ten had been compelled to sign a blank sheet upon being hired, allowing the employer to compose a letter of resignation that voids any complaint about the firing. In the case of Mexico's new budget airlines (such as Azteca, which just went bankrupt), according to Alcalde, the company goes one better and requires pilots to sign a paper acknowledging receipt of a fictitious "loan"—insuring the company against severance claims.
A March UN report pronounced Mexican child labor laws a "dead letter" in Mexico. Pint-sized street vendors, cashiers in family markets, and grocery baggers working only for tips, can be seen in every Mexican city. Recent press reports have spotlighted large numbers of children among miners in Guerrero (working 12-hour days for about $7 a day), melon harvesters in Michoacán (where kids reportedly make up more than half of the crews), coffee pickers in Puebla, and clothing maquiladoras in the Puebla maquila center of Tehuacán. The mayor of coffee-producing Xicotepec, Puebla commented, "Lately I've seen commercials saying it's against the law, but here work comes very naturally to the children, because it's their daily bread Children have accompanied their elders to the harvest here all their lives."
Natural or not, such work has consequences. In the dusty rural community of Analco, Tlaxcala where we are working on a community project, large numbers of children—especially boys—drop out after primary school to devote full-time to farming. Mexico, where the median level of education falls between 7th and 8th grade, can ill afford these dropout rates.
David Salgado, a nine-year old Mixtec boy from Guerero, paid an even higher price when he was crushed to death last January by a tractor while working the tomato harvest with his family in the fields of Sinaloa. Safety and health is another area where Mexican laws look better on paper than in reality. The most dramatic recent incident was the explosion and cave-in at the Pasta de Conchos coal mine, where 65 miners perished in 2006. A church-sponosored investigative commission found a history of negligence at the mine dating back to 2000 and continuing up to the time the investigation wrapped up more than a year after the tragedy.
The deindustrialization of Mexico?
Globalization and trade liberalization (a concerted government policy since the early 1980s) have had mixed effects on Mexican jobs. The influx of (often subsidized) U.S. agricultural goods and the spread of supermarkets that crave large-scale suppiers able to guarantee uniform quality have hammered small farmers. Mexico has become a net food importer. The textile industry, likewise, is in free-fall, shedding nearly 50,000 jobs a year during the Fox sexenio (presidential term). Southern Tlaxcala state, where we are living, is ground zero for textile job losses. Numerous factories are shuttered or entangled in prolonged "strikes" that have devolved into desperate struggles to extract some amount of severance pay. When we admired finely made wool rebozos at a local shop, the shopkeeper said, "Better buy them while you can. There used to be six factories here that made these; now there are none left." He shrugged, "We can't compete with the Chinese."
Apparel maquiladoras, once a huge growth industry are slipping away to Central America and the Far East as well. Even in Mexico's "Silicon Valley" in the western state of Jalisco, 60 percent of transnational companies have reportedly begun outsourcing, and Hitachi recently announced a plant closing that will idle 4,500 workers. Still, Mexico does continue to briskly export oil, autos and parts, and mano de obra in the form of migrants. Overall, the country's impressive $80 billion trade surplus with the United States is offset by trade deficits with every other major trading partner (a $62 billion deficit with Asia alone), leaving Mexico billions of dollars in the hole each year. While workers struggle to cope with the resulting layoffs and stagnating wages, Mexico's wealthy—like Carlos Slim, owner of the privatized TelMex phone company and recently declared the world's second-richest man—are doing just fine, thank you. According to an Economic Policy Institute study, Mexico's corporate profits grew 18 times as fast as the economy as a whole over the just-ended sexenio.
For decades, public employees were relatively protected from the economic ravages that rocked other Mexicans. But no longer. In mid-2006, when Oaxaca teachers mobilized their annual strike for higher wages, Governor Ulises Ruiz chose to forego the customary negotiation and instead unleashed savage repression that over the next six months escalated to mass arrests, disappearances and killings. In March 2007, ignoring worker protests, Mexico's Congress enacted a law to privatize government workers'pensions and convert them from guaranteed payouts to "defined contribution" plans dependent on investment returns.
Paper unions, charros, and independents
Mexican labor laws also codify workers' right to join a union. But only about ten percent of Mexican workers are unionized (around the same rate as in the United States). Even worse, as the former CEO of a supermarket chain explained to Chris, "In Mexico, it's very easy to have a union that's a paper union." Labor lawyer Alcalde estimates that over 90 percent of unioin contracts are contratos de protección, designed to shield the company from authentic labor representation in return for a dues rakeoff for union officials. Workers are often unaware they even have a union. Government control of whether unions get a registro permitting them to recruit workers in a given sector impedes independent organizing. When that fails, according to the Center for Labor Research and Union Advising (CILAS), the "official" unions often unleash armed goons to smack down opposition. (We spoke with a CILAS researcher the day his report on "union terrorism" hit the media; "I'm glad they didn't mention my name," he remarked wryly.
Napoleon Gómez, president of the "official" Miners' Union, refused to play the game and led a militant strike last year. The federal government twisted arms and managed to get him removed. This year it was discovered that some of the union officials' signatures on the document used to replace Gómez were forged, and he was reinstated. Advocates of union democracy rejoiced in the victory over government meddling, but the triumph was bittersweet. Gómez's militancy does not translate into a commitment to democracy or transparency. In fact, "Napoleon II" inherited his post from his father, and appears to have siphoned off tens of millions of dollars from the union's pension fund. (His temporary replacement has also been accused of looting the fund.) Gómez is currently running the union from Vancouver, where he is fighting extradition on embezzlement charges.
Moreover, as a knowledgeable observer of the Mexican labor scene commented to us, "Even the independent unions are not doing much to organize workers who aren't already unionized. They're fighting to divide a shrinking pool." And with a few exceptions (most notoriously Elba Esther Gordillo, the charro leader of the teacher's union who cut a political deal to accept the pension reform that puts her members' retirement at risk), both the official and the independent unions remain male-led despite the growing numbers of women in the workforce.
Two, three, many May Days?
The fractured and weakened state of Mexican labor was much in eveidence on May 1st. Gone are the days when hundreds of thousands of workers marched in lockstep with each other and with the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) that ruled Mexico for over 70 years. Mexico City saw four separate commemorations of the workers' holiday. The Mexican Confederation of Workers (CTM), the largest and most charro of the labor groupings, organized a small, half-hour long, and low-energy rally featuring mainstream political leaders like Beatriz Paredes, the current chair of the PRI (and perhaps the only woman speaker heard at any of the union-sponsored events that day). Independent unions, including the FAT, but also telephone and electrical workers, miners, firefighters, teachers, and many others, rocked the Zócalo with angry speeches, guerilla-theater, and a burning in effigy of teachers' union chief Gordillo and Calderón, arm in arm. Spirits were high and the turnout overshadowed the official celebration, but the numbers appeared to be in the thousands, not the tens of thousands.
Meanwhile, the Revolutionary Confederation of Workers and Peasants (CROC) and a number of other unions derided by some independents as "neo-charros" chose to boycott both marches and hold their own demonstration, where they naturally called for labor unity. Supporters of the Zapatista rebels followed yet another route, promoting the demands of indigenous and poor people, single mothers, prostitutes, and street vendors. In state capitals in Chihuahua, Guerrero, and our own Tlaxcala, pro- and anti-charro teachers' factions traded shoves and punches.
Nonetheless, May 1st brought hopeful signs as well. The independent unions massed alongside organizations of peasant (including one historically linked with the PRI) and migrants, plus leftists from the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), Mexico's second-largest party, reflecting new alliances that grew out of the tortilla price crisis of January-February. Slogans included food sovereignty as well as labor rights.
Winning better wages and working conditions depends on much more than the number of co-sponsors of a May Day demonstration. It will take local organizing, mobilizing for this fall's gubernatorial elections, creation of cooperatives and other "solidarity economy" outposts, and direct action. The scope of the problem is huge—even megabillionaire Carlos Slim acknowledges that widening inequality marks one of Mexico's greatest challenges. But the flowering of independent unionism is an important step toward a solution.
If guards organize, the terrorists win.
The Associated Press reports today that "Bush and his Senate allies will kill an antiterror bill if Congress sends it to the White House with a provision to let airport screeners unionize, the White House and 36 Republicans said yesterday."Bush et al's argument is that unionized TSA screeners would pose a threat to national security. Once unionized screeners would presumably get better pay, benefits, and job security—all those things unions are famous for helping workers win—than they have now. So I'm not really seeing the connection—in fact, I'd be tempted to say that, if we're going to have screeners at all, the greater risk comes from them being less satisfied with their jobs.
And it's not like this is even dirty politics, like Republicans' attempt last session to couple a minimum wage increase with cuts to the estate tax. Here the two issues—national security and the rights of the people who are, rightly or wrongly, delegated to protect it—seem very strongly connected indeed.
And it's not like the right to organize has undermined security in any other part of Homeland Security. Said John Gage, president of American Federation of Government Employees, "Denying these people rights that everyone else has in Homeland Security is not based on any rational reason."
Sounds about usual for the Bush administration.
See Stephen Barr's coverage in the Washington Post: Effort to Give TSA Screeners Union Rights Advances
Labels: labor, national security, unions