29-S. Demo. Oporto – Marqués de Vadillo. 18.30h.
There is no doubt about the reasons to strike. Politicians and employers have been getting us mad for two years. First they fired as many people as they could while taking a lot of public money in aid to banks and companies until unemployment reached almost five million people. When they already couldn’t fire anybody else, they started to decrease salaries for workers in the public and private sectors, as if the government had given a signal to start the race to cut salaries.
Now they have not only imposed another reform on us, making it easier to dismiss people, but they want to lower salaries, increase the retirement age, privatize health care…
Faced with so much abuse, a one-day strike (more of a symbolic day of work stoppage) arrives late and in the wrong way. CCOO and the UGT decided to call the strike only when only when the government had decided to dispense with them at the negotiating table, to pass the reform by decree. The sole purpose of this one-day strike is to try to maintain their monopoly on official (but not real) representation of the workers. At the end of the day, this is what they’ve been seeking for years, through constant concessions and humiliating surrenders. In short, they only want to called in to negotiate another reform, which will be just the same one disguised, but signed and sealed by them. This is what they did after the June 20th strike.
The official union model of union elections, paid union activists freed from their work duties, state subsidies and mediated action has led to a great extent to this situation, which the CNT has been warning people about for a long time.
It is not in vain that they have spent month knocking on everyone’s door to see who would support them. They even approached the CNT to ask us to make the call with them. They even offered that we appear in the photo. What an honour! Needless to say that we refused to join in this circus. The anarchosyndicalism of the CNT is not based on photos and appearances but on solidarity, mutual aid, self-management and direct action.
Therefore we are calling for participation in a strike – but let it be a real one, not so they will call us to negotiate a reform and some cuts which we are radically oppose to, but to get rid of them altogether. But above all, to take the first step in the reconstruction of a class-based unionism, which will defend the interests of all who have been suffering this deluge for the last two years, while the state unionist have participated in the spectacle of distributing aid and cutting rights. And we are going to do this, following our principles, without using delegationism or subsidies.
We will support the strike, hold pickets and demonstrations. Direct action will be our hallmark on September 29. We will attempt to overturn the labour reform which makes dismissals cheaper, facilitates group dismissals, favours renegging on the collective agreements (and their pay scales) and grants full powers to the professional unionists in the sectors on duty to negotiate with the employers to the detriment of the workers’ assemblies.
Worker, unemployed, student – it is time to reclaim what is ours, because if we don’t, they will continue to rob of us our rights. If you are fed up with seeing how the state unions bully us and want to participate in the building of revolutionary syndicalism, one that doesn’t sell itself to those in power for a bowl full of subsidies, drop in to the offices of the CNT or contact our union branch in your company.
Starting this September 29, and even before, we will see each other in the streets, against the abuse of the employers, politicians, bankers and fake union pilferers, because the fight does not end here.
FOR A GENERAL STRIKE THAT TOPPLES THE LABOR REFORM!
NO MORE FARCES!
JOIN THE CNT!
