Newsletter No. 27
APRIL / MAY 2005
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6-hour work day on agenda: Latin America turns left These days workers seem to be mostly on the receiving end of attacks on rights & wages, so the recent victory by Buenos Aires Metrovias subway workers, to gain a 44 per cent wage increase, and consolidate a 6-hour work day they won last spring, should hearten workers everywhere. The 1,900 workers won, against the US owners of the privatized system, by escalating strike action till it culminated in a week long strike. They also blocked tracks whenever strikebreakers tried to operate the trains. Argentina’s economy collapsed in 2001, triggered by a flight of capital, as the country defaulted on its loans. Massive unemployment ensued, drastically reducing living standards, including an average 20 per cent drop in wages. This makes the subway workers’ victory more notable. But it is part of a broad uprising against the elites in Argentina that toppled four governments in a few weeks, established popular assemblies and led employees of more than 200 firms to expropriate and operate them as worker cooperatives, under the motto, ‘to seize, to resist, to produce’. These firms work closely with their communities, building hope and an economic alternative in the rubble of Argentina's disastrous experiment with neo-liberalism. Unions won an across-the-board wage rise last year and a union-based movement, supported by left workers’ parties, has also started, that aims to reduce the work week to 30 hours, which the Metrovias workers have already achieved. However, the Argentine situation is very complex. The current Kirschner government is not a natural supporter of workers’ revolution. It is resisting across-the-board wage rises this year and turns a blind eye, if not actively incites, attempts to intimidate the co-operatives to return control to the owners. The Metrovias struggle is at a time when the popular masses throughout Latin America, centred on the working classes, are revolting against decades of US neo-liberalism, imposed on the continent’s 350 million people. Venezuela In February this year President Chavez announced a new direction for Venezuela’s economic development, on the eve of his government’s expropriation of an enormous paper factory after a hard won battle by 350 workers. The company declared bankruptcy and sacked 900 workers. The remaining 350 threatened to occupy the factory if government didn’t take it over. Workers and state representatives now co-manage it, as a pilot for similar ventures. The government plans to manage all basic industry on the worker-state run model so ‘development is based on co-operative and humanistic logic, as opposed to the capitalistic individualism of the global economy’ (www.venezuelanalysis.com). Labour is in ferment. A new grouping, the National Union of Workers (UNT) formed after the traditional Confederation of Venezuelan Workers collaborated with industry leaders to try to drive Chavez from office. UNT was crucial in stopping this and helped Chavez introduce “endogenous development" of industry where workers and state share management. Chavez and the ‘Bolivarian revolution’ openly challenge US imperialism and its lackeys. It seeks to unite Latin American countries economically and politically, to provoke a continent-wide fight-back. Chavez, an old maoist, sees the struggle as one in which the ‘south’ must resist the neo-imperialist Bush doctrine, which threatens to destroy the world. He believes its own rottenness will destroy the US empire, then the ‘great people of Martin Luther King will be free, the great US people, our brothers’ (Capitalism is Savagery’ Z-Net 10.4.05). This is the mortal danger Latin America’s revolt poses to the US ruling elites — that after more than a century as the ‘backyard’ of US imperialism, its closeness to the US workforce, its Latinos, Afro-Americans, unionists and social activists, can also inspire revolt in the US, as well as among the working classes of other industrial nations. Self management, progressive government, the break with the institutions of capitalist global control; more humane work relations including shorter work hours and ambitious programs to improve the lives of the majority — all made possible in context of workers control and greater community orientation: such achievements in ‘poor’ South America can only challenge North America’s workers to break out of the powerlessness and insularity in which US imperialism holds its own people. JB/WS |