Andrea Lobo
The 834 workers at the San Cristobal mine, the largest in Bolivia and the third-largest producer of silver in the world, went on an indefinite strike Sunday to demand that the Japanese-based transnational Sumitomo comply with an August 9 ruling by a labor court that it pay overtime for Sundays, holidays, extra and night-shift hours, which it has not done since it bought the mine in 2006.
Miners have denounced having to work 12-hour days of strenuous work for the last 12 years without being compensated fully. Facing growing unrest, the Mixed Union of San Cristobal Miners (SMTMSC) appealed in August 2018 to the Ministry of Labor and the labor courts, which handed down their ruling a year later. In March, the union transported 600 miners and family members to march in the capital of La Paz to appeal to the government of Evo Morales, which effectively controls the Bolivian Workers Central (COB) that the San Cristobal union belongs to.
Unable to contain the anger among miners after ordering them to work without full compensation for another year, the SMTMSC called a strike after the company failed to comply with the ruling. On Sunday, about 600 miners, family members and supporters carried out another march in La Paz. As of this writing on Monday, the company had not given a response.
The strike coincides with an indefinite national strike in the public health sector launched on Monday. Doctors, nurses and other health care workers are demanding a major increase in spending, from 6.5 percent to 10 percent of the government’s budget and to fulfill unpaid benefits for state employees, while improving the conditions at public hospitals. This follows a 47-day strike last year violently repressed by police that forced Morales to cancel a malpractice law intended to scapegoat doctors for the decrepit state of the state-run health care system. Morales still denounced “the political strike that has caused so much harm to thousands of sick people.”
In July, after two doctors died from a virus contracted at work, health care workers carried out another two-day strike. At the time, the leadership of the COB threatened strikers with “mobilizations,” i.e., deploying thugs, and firings, while they were being threatened by the Morales government with arrests, including an arrest warrant filed against the president of the Medical Union in La Paz.
Facing mounting unrest from below, Morales and his Movement toward Socialism (MAS) are veering sharply to the right, adopting authoritarian forms of rule to defend the profits of the transnational corporations and financial vultures. If the Sumitomo Corporation gathers that it can ignore the court ruling, it’s because it has taken the measure of the pro-corporate MAS government and its unions.
At the same time, feeling the wind from Japanese, European and US imperialism in his sails as the preferred party for bourgeois rule in Bolivia, Morales is pursuing a fourth term in the October 20 elections, defying a 2016 referendum result, the Constitution and frequent demonstrations.
On Saturday, at a mass campaign rally, Morales boasted that “a group of private business people has joined us, and what do they tell me? ‘I’m not a MAS member nor in the process of becoming one, but I’m profiting more from it than with my own party’. They say that sincerely.”
Morales is comfortably polling ahead of the despised right-wing former president and vice-president Carlos Mesa Gisbert, who had overseen the military repression that killed dozens during the mass uprising in 2003 in support of the nationalization of natural gas.
Miners in San Cristobal, striking doctors and the increasingly restive working class in Bolivia need to draw conclusions about the class character of the Morales government, MAS and the trade unions.
The coming to power of Morales—and Hugo Chávez, Néstor Kirchner, Lula da Silva before him—represented the response by the capitalist ruling elite to a series of mass uprisings with revolutionary prospects during the turn of the century across Latin America. This movement from below developed in opposition to the fast growth of social inequality from continued privatizations, austerity, subsequent economic stagnation and repression, after promises of prosperity and democracy during the transition from the military dictatorships that ruled between the 1960s and 1980s.
Between the 2000 “Cochabamba water war” against privatization of the water, through to the 2003 “natural gas war,” and the 2005 elections, Bolivia saw the downfall of five presidents. MAS, with the backing of dozens of pseudo-left organizations across the region, was able to channel this upsurge behind the 2005 presidential election of Morales.
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