Argentina - July 19 2024

Argentina: Meeting at the government's “Labor Secretariat”

The union bureaucracy’s embrace with Milei and his police regime

The Peronist bureaucracy has embraced openly the “May Pact” with the help of the CEOs of the Techint Group and other imperialist transnationals

7 months after Milei's inauguration, in case there were any doubts, everything is now clear: this anti-worker government is supported by the Peronist union bureaucracy, which divides and strangles the struggles of the working class... and the deputies and senators of the PJ that it needed to get its anti-worker laws voted for, while they posed as “opposition.”

The CGT bureaucrats have just embraced the Labor Secretary of the Milei government, who is a CEO of the Techint Group, a transnational corporation commands the war declared by the big capitalists and imperialism on the Argentina workers.
Yesterday they had unconditionally supported the Fernandezes government, which flogged the working class and the people with an unbearable inflation.

Traitors! They support those who auction off the nation to imperialism and are the same ones who hand over slave workers to the capitalists.

They are lackeys and very well país unofficial employees of the state, the government and the US embassy.

Along with Daer (Food Workers Union) Gerardo Martínez (Construcción Workers Union) and other bureaucrats, Furlan the general secretary of the UOM (Metalworkers Union), a Kirchnerite union bureaucrat, led the delegation. In the former Ministry of Labor he hugged the CEOs of the large steel association of the Techint Group. These big capitalists have the metal workers of branch 17 (Mechanics, Electromechanics and Manufacturing of the Metallurgical Industry and its Complementary Activities) with wages below the poverty line and the branch 21 (Steel Workers) suffering layoffs, furloughs and without collective bargains since November 2023.

These traitors of the union bureaucracy, blessed by the Videlista judges, have already put the 6 billion dollars of the Unions Health System in their pockets... They are already negotiating layoffs by factory. They have 50% of the labor that is unregistered or contracted outside of any agreement, and millions of unemployed left to their fate, suffering hunnger and Misery, with their leaders persecuted and imprisoned.
They are miserable traitors who have divided the forces and energies of the Argentine working class.

The Peronist union bureaucracy has embraced the government of the repressors, which keeps their comrades workers in federal prisons. Traitors and sellouts of those who fight!

The union bureaucracy does not represent us!
They support Milei and submit the working class to their executioners

There is nothing to demand from the union bureaucracy that has taken off its mask and openly supports the government. If the governors met in the May Pact with Milei, under the orders of the US embassy, now the bureaucracy entered that pact hand in hand with the Techint group, after surrendering hundreds of fights.

There is nothing that can be demanded of these bureaucrats other than, THEY MUST LEAVE!

From the bases, with assemblies and coordinating the struggles, we must disavow their spurious agreements and the giving in of the workers' conquests to the oligarchic government of Milei.

A new regrouping of the workers' ranks must be established.

We have to conquer a National Fight Committee

This is the task of the moment.
We must coordinate the resistance of employed and unemployed workers, which today is dispersed and out of sync.
To do this, we have to take the first step. To advance to the General Strike, we must open the way to openly defeat the traitors of the union bureaucracy.
It would be enough to set up a working and national struggle board of the dozens of establishments of state workers where there are already thousands of layoffs, of health workers in struggle such as the Posadas Hospital; of the workers of Acindar steelworks, Siat Tenaris and other metallurgical factories threatened with suspensions and dismissals; of the dairy workers of Atilra (Dairy workers Unión), to which Sancor has not paid their wages for months; of the Oil-Mill Workers Union and SUTNA (Tire Workers Union); of the railway workers threatened with privatizations and lay-offs; of the teachers revolting against starvation wages in the provinces; of the oil workers who are on a general strike for wages and against layoffs in Las Heras and all of Santa Cruz and a long etcetera of struggles.

It would be enough to set up this National Struggle Committee together with delegates from all sectors and currents of the picketeer movement (unemployed associations) to conquer an alternative pole to the traitors and sellouts of the Peronist union bureaucracy, henchmen of USA embassy and the great employers of the Llao Llao Forum.
The student movement, which has already proven to defend the free and public university and education must join this Struggle Committee.

The conditions to conquer this Struggle Committee that confronts the government, the big employers and the union bureaucracy are already set on the order of the day in each province and city and the immediate task is nothing more than coordinating the struggles and demands.

The emergence of this National Struggle Committee would drastically change the relationship of forces within the working class. The fact is the Milei government, due to the betrayal by the bureaucracy, has put the masses on a defensive mode with the terror of recession and unemployment.
The union bureaucracy has given in all collective labor agreements and collective bargaining, and guaranteed dismissals and suspensions.

Resolving this issue is a question of life and death since this would be the shortest way for the workers to prepare a counteroffensive against the government and the infamous regime.
It would be an alternative for the true picketeer movement (unemployed associations) to get back on its feet, to put an end to the begging mode before the Ministry of Social Action and the state of the capitalists, imposed on it by the left-wing leaderships.
A rallying pole would emerge to organize the recovery of the organizational bodies of delegates and internal commissions. It would be an alternative to organize for the millions of workers (50% of the total labor force) who, working unregistered, have been left to their fate by the union bureaucracy that split the Argentine labor movement in two. The demand for “everyone under collective agreement” is the demand that would allow workers to immediately unite factory by factory and at a national level.

With these treacherous leaderships and submitted to these bosses' politicians, the working class will never be able to free itself or stop the war that the capitalists have declared against it.

To reunify the ranks of workers: for a fighting program that stands at the level of the attack of the capitalists

It is about uniting the masses in struggle and launching a program that reunifies the ranks of workers. The catastrophe of the capitalist system is already here and falls on the shoulders of the workers due to the betrayal of their leaders.

When the bourgeoisie and its government have launched a fierce economic blow, now hyper-recessive, to scam the working class with thousands of layoffs, the minimum demands cannot be other than fighting for a minimum, living and mobile wage of AR$ 1,500,000 (roughly u$d 1,000), indexed monthly according to the increase of the cost of living.
And to end the furloughs and dismissals, the path is none other than imposing a reduction in the working hours without wage reduction.
The struggle of the unemployed movement cannot just be about eating today, but about achieving decent work for everyone, with one more shift in all the factories, paid for by the capitalists. There is plenty of money.

Yesterday with the super-inflation of the Fernandezes government, the capitalists made fabulous super-profits. Today, with the recession that is underway, they seek to extract direct superprofits in the productive process, reducing salaries, laying off at random and using millions of workers as slave labor without any rights.
The capitalists are incapable of putting the machines into full operation, which they themselves destroy. They leave the only commodity that creates wealth, which is labor power, wasted by the hundreds of thousands. It is the capitalist system and imperialist plunder that has paralyzed the nation. The waste of human labor results from the capitalist anarchy, imperialist colonization and the uncontrollable pursuit of profits by a handful of parasites that control the production of goods.

Those at the top have waged a fierce war against the workers, attacking their property, which is their wages and work.
Therefore, the immediate task of the working class against layoffs, furloughs and the refusal of wage increases is to demand that the accounting books of companies and banks be opened to demonstrate the superprofits accumulated by capitalists, the billions of dollars that have fled the country and the extra prices they have charged on their products.
With the opening of the accounting books, it would quickly be revealed that the “State debt” is nothing more than the superprofits of the banks and the plundering of the nation by imperialism and the IMF.

Every program for workers' wages is closely linked to fighting for a break with imperialism and the IMF and for immediately nationalizing, without payment and under workers' control, natural resources such as lithium, gas, oil, minerals that are already being stolen by the imperialist pirates.

The employers threaten with and have already imposed furloughs, layoffs and factory closures, so that the working class gives up in its fight for wages, and accepts the labor flexibility that, on the other hand, the Peronist government has already prepared with 50% of the workers being unregistered.
Workers cannot and should not accept the complaints of individual capitalists, no matter how petty they may consider themselves to be, since these capitalists are victims of their own regime and system, which they defend tooth and nail.
As in 2001, the claim cannot be other than for every factory that closes, suspends or fires to be nationalized without payment and under workers' control or under direct workers' administration.
It is incomprehensible that today the parliamentary left hides that in the face of the crisis of dismissals and suspensions the alternative is, “For 100, 1,000 Zanons!” (one of the factories taken over by its workers, who put it to work under their own administration in the 2001 Argentinazo. NT)

The minimum and immediate demand to be able to fight for wages and for work cannot be other than that all unregistered, outsourced and temporary contracted workers go under a perm-staff collective agreement. Also,  unemployed committees must be set up to achieve that unions and labor organizations affiliate them.
Let the unions open their doors, like the universities, so that the unemployed can eat there and organize to fight for bread and decent work! Stop treating the working class, producers of the entire nation's wealth, like beggars!

Enough fighting divided!
Freedom to all prisoners for fighting! Dissolution of the repressive forces! Self-defense committees!
Down with the police and autocratic regime of the arch-reactionary Constitution of 1853!

An independent proletarian strategy must be set up

Weeks ago, leftist currents like the PTS proposed a petition, where workers had to put their signature, their full name and surname, and even their National Identity Document number, to demand that the CGT promote a general strike on the day the Bases Law was enacted.
No kidding! Bringing the bureaucracy into the fight with a petition? To that bureaucracy to which the state guarantees the 6 billion dollars of the Union Health System in exchange to surrendering the workers? To the bureaucracy that supported the Fernandezes anti-worker government? Isn't it a petition for the employers and the bureaucracy to make “black lists” of the fighters? Do you say a petition to pressure the rubber-stamp Congress, a notary office of USA and Wall Street? This idea can only be convicted by the reformist left, which is hanging at the feet of Kirchnerism. They are co-responsible for the trap into which the working class was led and disorganized its enormous struggles of these months, which were subjected to the bourgeois Parliament and strangled by the betrayal of the union bureaucracy.

Another variant of the reformist left is its role in the unions. Members of Política Obrera who lead very important factory internal commissions such as that of Acindar, have proclaimed that “taking an industrial action when the company has no orders or no production is directly kicking in the air”. Undoubtedly, this is how a reformist unionist translates his party's policies to the real world.
This is said by a leader of one of the largest factories in Argentina, where two indefinite strikes were called in recent months and were lifted 10 minutes after being called. What a paradox. This is a voluntary confession. They called for strikes that they never wanted to actualize, because they always ended up at the negotiation boards where more than 300 workers lost their jobs, the rest were furloughed with wages reductions and instead of wage increases they received bonuses on account of future collective bargains, far behind the percentage of inflation since November until now (in a country that has around 200% or more of yearly inflation)
What these labor leaders who pose as “great unionists” are saying is that in times of crisis it is the working class that must pay for it. This is really a kicking in the air... and to the heads of the workers.
In fact, in times of catastrophe and crises the immediate economic struggle becomes impotent. But that doesn't mean that the workers have to be the ones who pay for the crisis.
The demand for a reduction in the working day with equal pay becomes the most immediate task for workers.
Companies say they have no sales and that is why they lower production. And we workers have to tell them: “You come from accumulating super profits. Open the accounting books to see if it is true that you win or lose.” Workers will propose, if necessary, the reduction of working hours, without any type of salary discount.
This program that the left raises in the elections and the “holidays” is hidden and kept under lock and key in the daily combats in the midst of the crash and the desperation of the workers in the face of layoffs.
The left currents’ delegates act like the Kirchnerite Furlan delegates and the union bureaucracy within the labor movement.

The cretinism of the unionist left pursues the cretinism of the parliamentary reformist left like soul to the body.

The working class needs new leadership and a new program to succeed.
The old unions led by the traitors of the Peronist bureaucracy have been weakened to the extreme. These Unions do not represent more than 20 or 25% of the workers. The masses also need new ad hoc organizations to coordinate their struggle and their daily battles.

It is time for the working class to disavow this traitorous union bureaucracy that only disorganizes what the masses build in their struggle. It is time to break every bond imposed by the bureaucracy and the parliamentary left to illusions that with Peronism in the “opposition” victory can be achieved.
These are lies. The approval of the Bases Law has already demonstrated this. The embrace of the Peronist union bureaucracy with the Milei government is also demonstrating this today.
The PJ and Kirchner are fighting hard to ensure that Milei has governability for the next 4 years, so that he finishes defeating the workers and handing over the nation. Only the businesses that will remain as a result of the imperialist plunder are disputed.
For some time now, the Kirchnerites have been proclaiming that this rotten, bankrupt capitalist system is the only one that can “correctly and fairly distribute goods and services in society”… An infamy, like the 10 points of Milei, to whom Kirchnerism proposes a pact of “national unity” to sustain the “bimonetary economy” as (former president and vice president) Cristina Fernández de Kirchner says. This economy is where workers are left without jobs, they work like slaves for salaries of 400 thousand pesos (well under the poverty line, NT), they get reduced their purchasing power month after month, while those at the top keep amounting the dollars... and also the pesos.

It is necessary to set up a National Struggle Committee now and break all submission to the executioners of the workers, both from the government and from the bourgeois "opposition", who are all under the discipline of the US embassy.

We must prepare a worker and popular counteroffensive that defeats this repressive and anti-worker, police regime. To make this government go down and put an end to the power of the 23 billionaires who are serial currency leakers in the country, of the holders of the large tracts of land, of the bankers and the CEOs of the transnationals.
They are a tiny minority of the population, who has become rich at the expense of millions and millions of workers. They are the ones who meet at the Sheraton and the Llao Llao Hotels in Forums commanded by the USA embassy. They are a handful of looters of the nation who come for lithium, copper, gas, oil and for the blood and sweat of the workers in a maquila Argentina.
The Milei government commands an attack against all the conquests of the working class and colonization of the nation. It's them or us. They have come for everything.
The economic struggle must be elevated to a political struggle. It is about preparing a workers' and popular counteroffensive that, with strikes, pickets and the General Strike, defeats this government and opens the way to the Argentinazo, this time, to make them go away, so that not a single one of them remains and the government passes into the hands of the workers and the poor people.

Argentina will be socialist or a colony of Wall Street!
The country is not for sale, on condition the power passes into the hands of the working class and the revolutionary people!

Statement of the Liga Obrera Internacionalista (LOI-CI)
Democracia Obrera of Argentina