Argentina - June 2nd, 2021

At the peak of the pandemic, workers are either forced to starve while unemployed or work risking their lives, without vaccines or sanitary conditions, due to the betrayal of the union and piquetera bureaucracy

The criminal "health plan" of Fernández
and the capitalists for the working class

In the highest peak of infections and deaths from Covid-19, the Fernandezes with a DNU (Necessity and Urgency Decree) and through agreements with (Buenos Aires City governor) Larreta and the other governors, define partial and temporary sanitary "confinements" with the sole purpose of protecting the profits of the capitalists and transnational companies.
While calming the petty-bourgeoisie and the anti-labor middle classes by enabling the opening of almost the entire commercial activity, millions of exploited are forced to work, and to use public transportation to go to their workplaces, both with or without “confinement”. Without vaccines or minimum sanitary conditions, in increasingly flexible and precarious jobs, “essential” workers are led to die in deadly factories or schools for going to work. The "health plan" to take care of us by the Fernandezes is criminal.
In Toyota and Acindar plants, as in all factories and establishments in the country, the rate of Covid-19 infections, which far exceeds the national average, increases every day even though A. Fernández says cynically that workers are not infected in factories. Meanwhile, unemployed and homeless workers are condemned to hunger and the virus: they are prohibited from demanding a greater ration of food and vaccines so as not to die.

The fact is that the government's “confinement” and “partial liberation” measures, by decree and with greater police control over the labor movement, express a greater Bonapartization of the regime. With the excuse of the pandemic, it doesn’t hesitate to repress any mobilization and struggle of both the employed and unemployed workers for minimum conditions so as not to die, if it escapes the tight control of the collaborationist leaderships that have sealed a deal with the government, which imposes measures tailored to the UIA (Argentine Industrial Union), the bankers and the IMF. These measures are not to protect the workers from the virus but to protect the profits of the capitalists and to hand over the nation to imperialism. It’s clear that the virus gets us sick, but it is capitalism and its governments which kill.

This would not be possible without the betrayal of the union and piquetera bureaucracy, which act as ministers without portfolio or as direct officials of the capitalists' government. With their betrayal and surrender, they tie our hands, preventing us  from fighting for vaccines for all workers by touching the property of the capitalists and uniting the employed and the unemployed in the same combat. They have given up our salary and working conditions, led the unemployed workers to beg, and today they give up our lives because they lead us to die infected while working or starving while unemployed.

The Fernandezes, supported by the union and piquetera bureaucracy, guarantee the capitalists millions of workers producing without spending a penny to protect their lives. Therefore, at the peak of the pandemic, the government needs to defer the high number of infections with weekly and partial “lockdowns” without detriment to the capitalists, not to have thousands of dead workers piled up in hospitals. Their calculations are simple: reducing the rise in infections somewhat to release a certain number of beds, giving "breathing space" to an already collapsed health system and to health workers, especially nurses, who are completely exhausted. It’s that after more than a year of pandemic they are in very bad shape by intensive and long hours of work, without vacations or days off and with miserable wages. Exposed to the virus and without all of them having been vaccinated, it’s a sector that has hundreds of deaths.

The ruin of the health system, emptied during decades by different governments for the repayment of the fraudulent debt, as well as the precariousness of health workers, is due to the surrender of the trade union bureaucracy by the traitor Daer, who in a social pact with Fernandez has left thousands of workers in the sector exposed to contagion and to die while putting the health of all the workers and exploited of the country in the criminal hands of the government and the IMF. Fernandez has paid very well for the services rendered by these scabs, whose hands are stained with blood, with a bailout of 11,400 million to the union social health services that they handle at will.
The "sanitary plan" of those above doesn’t solve anything epidemiologically nor does it contemplate the high cost of living and inflation that destroys the already miserable wages of workers, who being underfed and malnourished are an easy victim of the coronavirus. In the "country of cows" you can no longer eat even a piece of meat while the capitalists and the business chambers of the sector continue to make fortunes.
A. Fernandez doesn’t take “makeshift measures” nor are they "late” for the workers, as the FIT-U parliamentary left insistently says. It’s not in the government plans to declare any laboratory of "public utility" in favor of obtaining vaccines for the workers but to defend the interests of the bourgeoisie and guarantee the payment of the fraudulent debt to the IMF on the life and bones of the working class, ripping off a higher rate of plus value. The CGT and CTA bureaucrats, "confined" in their luxury mansions and apartments in exclusive Puerto Madero, are the guarantors of this crime against the working class to quench the capitalists' thirst for profit.

Enough is enough! We cannot leave the health and life of the workers in the hands of the Fernandezes and the capitalists! We workers alone can conquer vaccines, jobs and wages to defend our lives!

We have to win the streets again, we have to take the example started by the self-convened bus drivers such as those on Line 60 who carried out pickets and mobilizations demanding vaccination. It’s necessary to generalize the strike of the port and maritime workers who paralyzed foreign trade demanding vaccines so as not to die. That is the only way for all the employed and unemployed workers in the country. The life of those of us who produce the wealth and make the country work is at stake. We have to unify our forces against the farce of the criminal "health plan" of the Fernandezes and Larreta government and the governors.

It’s a question of life and death to overthrow the infamous social pact that the union and piquetera bureaucracy has sealed with the Fernandezes, the UIA, the oligarchy and the bankers.
The way out is to set up a National Fighting Committee whose main resolution should be to kick out the traitorous bureaucracy of the CGT and the CTA in order to win vaccination right now and minimum sanitary conditions for all the employed and unemployed workers in the country.
We must disavow all the patent agreements and expropriate the AstraZeneca laboratory in Garín and all the laboratories and pharmaceutical companies. This measure would be a minimum compensation for the looting of the nation by the monopolies and imperialism.

All private clinics and hospitals must be expropriated without compensation and under the control of their workers. The fight is for the tripling of the health budget based on the non-repayment of the debt. Out with the IMF!
The immediate task is to set up a National Public Health Committee under the control of the workers and their organizations with the advice of the best professionals, scientists and the CONICET to design a health plan right now to take care of the life of the working class.
From the unions, the workers' organizations and the combative unemployed movements, it’s necessary to organize a WORKERS AND PEOPLE'S EMERGENCY PLAN. Setting up, in the first place, workers' safety and hygiene committees elected in assemblies that stop production right now. Our life is at risk ... Without vaccines we will not work! Quarantine for all workers with 100% salary!

It’s urgent, so that no working family without work goes hungry, to expropriate the large supermarket chains, the land and the cows of the oligarchy. These will be at the service of feeding the only truly essential part of this rotten capitalist system, the workers.
For work and salary equal to the family basket of 100 thousand pesos for all workers in the country. If this system cannot guarantee life, not even a piece of bread to its slaves, it deserves to die.
None of these measures can be guaranteed by a government of the capitalists like the Fernandezes government. The key to achieving these measures is in the hands of the working class and its organizations fighting against the property of the exploiters. Because “The capitalists are able to cede something to the workers only if they are threatened with the danger of losing everything” (L.T. Whither France?)
The working class has to weigh again against this sweetened Macri, as it did in December 2017, when we fought the Macri pension reform by bypassing the union bureaucracy to impose the general strike and confronting the murderous police with tons of stones on the Congress.  It’s necessary to set up the power of the exploited with assemblies, pickets and the general strike, on the way to conquer a provisional revolutionary workers' and popular government, based on bodies of self-determination of the masses. This government will be the only one that can guarantee an Emergency Health Plan, breaking with imperialism and expropriating the expropriators to protect and safeguard the health and lives of the masses.

It's them or us!