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Economic recovery helps spur strikes
for wage rises
By Mario Osava
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Sept. 28 (IPS) — Brazil’s
current economic recovery, following a long period of stagnation and
unemployment, has prompted a wave of strikes in which workers are demanding
wage hikes after years of declining buying power.
Judicial functionaries in the state of Sao Paulo returned to work Sept.
21 after a 91-day strike. But bank employees decided to continue the
work stoppage they declared 14 days ago, and pilots working for Brazil’s
VASP airline went on strike Sept. 21 and Sept. 21 to demand the payment
of back wages.
The 106,000 metalworkers in ABC, industrial suburbs of the southern
city of Sao Paulo which developed major steel, auto and other heavy
industry in the 1970s and 1980s, have also begun to hold a series of
stoppages in companies that refuse to agree to a 9.57 percent wage rise.
The pressure by the metalworkers’ trade union — which for
years was led by current leftist President Luiz Inácio Lula da
Silva — has already achieved agreements in dozens of companies.
Oil and chemical industry workers are also threatening to go on strike
if their demands for higher wages and better working conditions are
not met.
The work stoppages are taking advantage of the economic growth that
this country of 178 million is enjoying after “10 years of shrinking
wages,” said Joao Antonio Felicio, secretary-general of the Central
Unica de Trabalhadores (CUT), Brazil’s largest trade union federation.
Economists and analysts project Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth
of at least four percent this year. GDP expanded 5.7 percent in the
second quarter, the strongest rate since 1996.
And the Labor Ministry reported the creation of nearly 1.5 million new
jobs in the country between January and August.
Labor activism, which was basically dormant for years because of the
fears generated by growing unemployment, has now been jolted awake,
said Felicio.
A study by the Inter-Union Department for Statistics and Socioeconomic
Studies found that in the first half of the year, trade unions were
successful in regaining lost wages in 79 percent of their collective
bargaining efforts, “reversing an eight-year tendency” during
which inflation steadily ate away at workers’ real incomes, said
Felicio.
For years, the average wage earned by Brazilians has been gradually
shrinking, by 12.5 percent in metropolitan regions last year, compared
to a 0.2 percent contraction of the economy in the same period.
CUT called for workers to launch a campaign to recover wages in the
second half of the year, when conditions for applying pressure are more
favorable due to the rise in production geared towards the increased
demand and consumption of the year-end holidays, when employees are
paid a Christmas bonus, said Felicio.
Wage-earners have seen their buying power plummet during years of a
sluggish economy.
Bank employees, who totaled 800,000 nationwide 15 years ago, number
half that total today, and their average salary has shrunk as banks
have cut costs and watched their profits grow, Felicio said to illustrate.
Bank employees are on strike to demand a 25 percent wage hike, instead
of the 12.77 percent offered by the banks, which would represent only
a small real increase, as cumulative inflation has stood at 7.18 percent
in the past 12 months.
The stoppage declared by bank workers has been only partial, and has
had a stronger impact on the state-owned Banco do Brasil and Caja Económica
Federal.
The measure has caused problems for the public, although automatic teller
machines and on-line transactions have helped people get around the
difficulties.
But the prolongation of the strike could bring serious consequences
for the 23 million retirees who begin to draw their monthly pensions
from the state-run banks on Sept. 30.
Labor Minister Ricardo Berzoini, a former head of the bank employees’
union, refused to support his former colleagues and criticized what
he said was an attempt to influence the Oct. 3 municipal elections.
In the meantime, analysts have described the 48-hour stoppage by the
VASP airline pilots as a kind of “suicide strike,” because
their company is facing a serious financial crisis. Salaries have suffered
months of delays. And in the past week, many flights have had to be
cancelled because of a shortage of airplanes in safe condition to fly.
Felicio predicted further strikes in the next few months by public employees
of the state of Sao Paulo, who he says are basically condemned to a
diet of “bread and water,” earning wages that have been frozen
for eight years.
For the past three months, striking state employees brought the Sao
Paulo justice system to a halt. More than 12 million legal cases were
paralyzed and 450,000 court hearings were cancelled, said the president
of the Bar Association of Sao Paulo, Luiz Flavio D’Urso.
The Sao Paulo judicial functionaries were initially calling for a nearly
40 percent raise, arguing that their wages had not been indexed to inflation
for years. But they accepted an increase of just 14.5 percent when the
state government argued that the budget was too short of funds to provide
a larger wage hike.
However, the judicial workers announced that they are still on a state
of alert and will walk out if their wages are docked for the days they
were on strike.
Untouchables in new battle for jobs
By Randeep Ramesh
Ahmedabad, India, Oct. 3 — Flanked by green cricket fields
where he once played and a university from which he graduated, Arvind
Vaghela tries not to notice the stream of students walking past. “I
used to be like them, attending lectures and going out on the fields.
But now I just hide my face,” he said.
The reason for his shame is the broom in his hand. Despite a masters
degree in economics from Gujarat University in Ahmedabad, the best job
Vaghela, 24, could get was one done by generations of his family: roadsweeper.
“I wanted to work in sales for a bank, but you needed to have your
own vehicle. I come from a poor family, so how could I afford that?
When my father died I was offered his job and I took it,” he said.
As a Dalit, or untouchable, Vaghela’s story is familiar in this
sprawling west Indian city. Nearly 100 of its council sanitation workers
have degrees in subjects ranging from computing to law, but cannot get
better jobs because they are Dalits.
Their experience is part of an increasingly heated debate in India,
where the government has announced that it will consider extending public-sector
job quotas for people from the lowest castes to the private sector.
Industrialists, who insist private-sector jobs and promotions are earned
on merit, say that this will make businesses inefficient and uncompetitive.
Rahul Bajaj, who chairs a large motorcycle manufacturer, wrote in the
Times of India that public-sector job quotas had reduced the “effectiveness
of government” because decisions were not made on the basis of
ability.
This argument leaves Ahmedabad’s roadsweeping graduates unimpressed.
Most say that they have had to face discrimination or exploitation in
the booming private sector.
“I got a job with a firm of accountants and then had to present
my qualifications. On one school certificate it mentioned my caste.
“The next day I was told there had been a mistake — I was
not required any more,” said Dalit sweeper Prakash Chauhan, 32,
who has a degree in commerce.
Chauhan stresses he is relatively well paid, at $88 a month, and his
job is secure. “This is a job for life. But it was my father’s
life. Our parents had a dream that education would mean we would not
have to do the jobs they did. It did not turn out that way.”
Dalits, the lowest caste, have endured centuries of discrimination and
violence because of a social order that consigns them and their descendants
to jobs nobody else wants to do and a tradition that all humans are
created unequal.
In rural India Dalits have been murdered for proposing to marry somebody
further up the social ladder, barred from temples, forced into bonded
labor and made to carry human waste from the homes of high-caste Hindus.
In the cities, where it is easier to change one’s name and slip
into the crowd, Dalits say economic exclusion is now the biggest issue.
The ingrained unfairness of the caste system has brought pressure for
reform on human rights grounds against Western firms doing business
in India. Unions have written to 300 companies in Europe which outsource
work to India to check that their subcontractors do not discriminate
on the basis of caste.
“There are many parallels with the situation in South Africa in
the Sixties, when foreign companies needed to be persuaded to address
the discrimination in the system of apartheid,” said David Haslam,
the London-based chair of the Dalit Solidarity Network.
Chandra Bhan Prasad, a Dalit writer who has proposed many new affirmative
action programs in India, says businesses should look for inspiration
to the United States, where firms carry out diversity audits and give
contracts to firms from minority groups.
“About a fifth of General Motors managers are African American,
Hispanic or Native American. GM actually goes out of its way to recruit
from these communities. The company also places $2 billion of business
into the minority communities. No Indian business has done the same.”
These measures helped to create a black middle class, he says, making
African Americans part of mainstream life in the US. By contrast, Prasad
says, if Oprah Winfrey had been born in India she would have remained
chained to poverty rather than become one of the world’s richest
women.
“Here family connections and caste matter more than ability. It
is still the case of who you know, not what you can do.
“In the US you have black billionaires, industrialists, black film
stars, black professors. In India university professorships are closed
to us. We do not have one Dalit millionaire. There is not one Dalit
newspaper editor, nor a Dalit newscaster.”
Academics caution, however, that there is one big difference between
race and Indian caste. “No one can tell from your appearance that
you are a Dalit. The same cannot be said for African Americans,”
says Shyam Babu, a research fellow at the Rajiv Gandhi Institute, a
think-tank in New Delhi.
“It is more subtle. Once you know someone’s name and where
they are from, most Indians can identify your caste. The basic bigotry
is the same: you assume an entire ethnic group is incompetent.”
Source: Observer (UK)
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