/MAY DAY/LABOUR-LATAM: A First of May with Little to Celebrate

By Mario Osava Reprint | | Print |

Commentary - Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO, Apr 29 2002 (IPS) - With millions of workers in Latin America lacking even the most basic labour benefits, May 1 — International Labour Day — appears destined to become a day of nostalgia and rearguard actions to preserve past gains rather than a day of struggle for new conquests.

The inability of Argentina’s trade unions to defend the basic rights and incomes of workers provides an extreme case in point of a once-powerful labour movement that has been emaciated by today’s globalised economy.

At the continent’s other end, the alliance between the Confederation of Venezuelan Workers and the business and military leaders who staged the Apr. 12 coup d’etat that overthrew President Hugo Chavez for two days appears to have subverted labour’s struggle and divided workers.

The labour movement’s loss of strength and direction has been accentuated by an overall rise in unemployment and the growth in precarious employment, the informal economy, and the black market.

On the defensive everywhere, many central trade unions are confining themselves to resisting legal changes designed to make labour markets more flexible, in the parlance of the new laws’ sponsors. Seen from the shop floor, the changes threaten to eliminate rights once regarded as permanent conquests: vacations, guarantees against unfair firing practices, and protection from wage cuts.

For their part, governments as well as business communities say the changes are needed to survive in the intensely and increasingly cutthroat world of open markets.

For Latin America as for much of the developing world, competitiveness is based chiefly on the low cost of labour – in other words, on the slashing of wages and rolling back of rights in order to compete with the technological and financial advantages and superior infrastructure of industrialised countries.

Yet, at the same time, advances in technology as well as business organisation and management lead to a reduction in the number of jobs available.

Full employment, which could restore some of the power of the trade unions, is increasingly a “conservative utopia”, a dream of the past, says Senator Eduardo Suplicy of the Workers’ Party of Brazil, even as he seeks to defend the minimum wage as a lifelong right of everyone regardless of one’s ability to work.

Against this backdrop, the surprise defeat of socialist candidate Lionel Jospin by the far-right’s Jean-Marie le Pen in France’s recent presidential elections comes as a further blow to morale and hopes of international mobilising – especially in light of the turmoil seen in Italy under Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. Le Pen is scheduled to take on conservative Jacques Chirac in a run-off election May 5.

But in Latin America, there is much more to gain than to preserve. In this region, some of the best-paid business executives in the world coexist alongside millions of workers who lack even the most basic rights and benefits.

Brazil marked the Day of the Domestic Worker last Saturday, dedicated to the country’s 5.3 million cleaners, cooks, and other domestic-service staff. Some 3.9 million of them work in the informal sector of the economy, where they receive no labour benefits, according to the Ministry of Social Security.

Authorities here also are clamping down on modern-day slave labour. Last year, they freed 2,062 workers held in debt bondage on plantations, especially in Amazon jungle areas. These people lived in subhuman conditions and were not allowed to leave the plantations where they toiled to service “invented” debts, reported the Pastoral Land Commission, a Catholic Church group.

Only one-third of Brazil’s economically active population works in the formal economy, which makes it difficult to organise a social security system that is viable in the long-run, to distribute the tax burden fairly, to reduce inequality, or even to gather precise statistics on unemployment.

According to official figures, unemployment in Brazil stands at 7.1 percent.

However, a government body with links to a trade union research centre estimates unemployment at 19.9 percent in the metropolitan region of Sao Paulo. This means there could be as many as 1.9 million unemployed people in Brazil’s largest city.

As Brazilian singer-songwriter Caetano Veloso puts it, in this region, “everything is in the process of construction and is already in ruins.”