Defeat of fear well underway in Puerto Rican general strike ...

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Defeat of fear well underway in Puerto Rican general strike
By Kate Thomas on October 15, 2009 10:30 AM
SEIU - Service Employees International Union - Search Results

On the morning of day one of the General Strike in Puerto Rico, organizers are already declaring the protest a great success.

Yesterday late in the afternoon, the owners of Plaza las Americas, the largest shopping mall in the Caribbean, announced that it would remain closed on October 15 "due to security reasons." Coincidentally, Plaza las Americas owners also happen to be some of the biggest contributors to the Republican Party and their henchman, Governor Luis Fortuño. So it's very appropriate that the main gathering location of the strike is in front of this very shopping center, to serve as a symbol of the greedy upper class that supports the draconian measures taken by the current Puerto Rican administration.Two successful events that have already taken place today in the strike include the closing of Plaza Las Americas and more significantly, the defeat of fear. Hundreds of thousands of workers are now marching for justice, overcoming the campaign of media terror launched by the Puerto Rican Government during the last days. Protesters are marching from seven different locations of the Banks Zone in San Juan today, heading towards the southern side of Plaza Las Americas--which is expected to largest public gathering in Puerto Rican history.

Today's national protest is being led by the Todo Puerto Rico Por Puerto Rico, a coalition that is composed of unions, civic, professional, religious, community and other civil society organizations, and includes SEIU Locals 1996SPT and 1199UGT.
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Al Jazeera English - Americas - Puerto Ricans strike over job cuts

Friday, October 16, 2009
00:21 Mecca time, 21:21 GMT
News Americas
Puerto Ricans strike over job cuts


Thousands of people have filled the streets of Puerto Rico's capital in a strike protesting against government move to fire thousands of workers.

Businesses, school and some official agencies in San Juan were either closed or faced disruption as the 24-hour strike took hold on Thursday.

Governor Luis Fortuno, who last month announced the firing of 17,000 public workers, appealed for calm and said the redundancies would shrink the US territory's $3.2bn budget deficit.

"Nobody supports firings, but there was no other option," he said on Thursday.

Unemployment in Puerto Rico, which has a population of nearly four million, was 15.8 per cent in August, higher than any US state.

Traffic blocked

The Caribbean island, which is home to several petrochemical, pharmaceutical and technology companies, has been in recession for more than three years.

Police guarded government buildings in San Juan as protesters headed to the Hato Rey financial district near Plaza Las Americas, the Caribbean's largest mall.

The mall, with 300 stores and more than 10,000 employees, shut its doors, along with other businesses and private schools in the area.

Some traffic routes were blocked by protesters in early morning protests and many streets were empty as people decided to stay at home for the duration of the strike.

Fortuno has said that the job cuts will prevent the country's bond rating from being downgraded to non-investment grade and that the firings will lead to a cut in government spending by $2bn a year.

He has argued that a credit downgrade would cause more harm to the economy and lead to job cuts far in excess of those made in the public sector.

The government has passed a series of spending cuts and recruitment freezes, and has imposed temporary taxes.

It has also sunk money into public infrastructure investment and low-cost financing to help boost the economy, which shrank a record 5.5 per cent in the 2009 fiscal year that ended June 30.
Source: Agencies
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General strike hits Puerto Rico | SocialistWorker.org
Analysis: Lee Sustar


General strike hits Puerto Rico
Lee Sustar looks at the background to Puerto Rico's dramatic general strike movement to defend public-sector jobs.

October 15, 2009

PUERTO RICAN unions are poised to shut down much of the island's economy October 15 in a general strike to protest massive public-sector layoffs by right-wing Gov. Luis Fortuño.

The unions were spurred into action when Fortuño announced that under the new Law 7, some 17,000 government workers would lose their jobs to help close a $3.2 billion budget deficit--and the job cuts could reach 30,000 in coming months.

With unemployment on the island officially at 16 percent, the job losses would hammer working class people already suffering from the recession.

The widespread anger over the layoffs has propelled even the more conservative unions into action. Roberto Pagán, president of the Puerto Rican Union of Workers (SPT according to its initials in Spanish), an affiliate of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), told reporters that if Fortuño doesn't back down following the one-day work stoppage, the unions would move forward with an "indefinite general strike." Pagán, however, said that he expected airports would function as usual during the one-day strike.

Meanwhile, the more militant independent unions--which initiated the call for the general strike--were confident that the action would get a strong response. The spokesperson for the Union Coordination for a Broad Front of Solidarity and Struggle (FASyL), Luis Pedraza Leduc, predicted that the general strike would be "a massive demonstration that inundates the streets of San Juan," the capital city.

Fortuño--of the Partido Nuevo Progresista (PNP, the equivalent of the Republican Party)--has responded by upping the ante. He's threatening to charge strikers with "terrorism" if they succeed in disrupting the island's ports or the flow of commerce.

Law 7, passed in March, allows Fortuño to unilaterally dismiss public-sector workers, overriding labor laws that previously prohibited such actions. Union contracts are no protection for workers, either: Law 7 effectively voids any job protections they may contain. What's more, Law 7 clears the way for even more radical reduction in the number of public-sector workers by allowing for "Public-Private Alliances"--a euphemistic phrase for handing over government functions to private corporations.

If Fortuño thought he could get away with this blitzkrieg, it's in part because Puerto Rico's union movement has been divided in recent years. Earlier this year, unions that belong to the AFL-CIO and Change to Win (CTW) federations refused to join a May Day strike call by five independent unions earlier this year. Even so, some 15,000 workers joined a spirited march that day.

A major obstacle to labor unity in Puerto Rico has been the SEIU, which dominates the CTW federation. After a strike in 2008 by the Puerto Rican teachers union, the Federación de Maestros Puertoriqueño (FMPR), the SEIU made a political deal with the previous governor to try and replace the FMPR as the main teachers' union. Puerto Rico's teachers, however, rejected the deal.

Now, however, the scale of Fortuño's attack has spurred almost all of Puerto Rico's unions to respond to the grassroots movement to fight back. The AFL-CIO and CTW unions, for example, supported a protest called the People's Assembly June 5. According to some estimates, the turnout reached 100,000, which would make it one of the largest protests in Puerto Rican history. But it was the independent unions, rank-and-file activists and the left that kept pushing for the general strike.

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A BIG boost to the strike movement has come from college students. At the Colegio de Mayagüez, a campus of the University of Puerto Rico (UPR), the Student Council in Defense of Public Education (CEDEP) called for a mass meeting to discuss a response to the cuts.

On October 6, some 5,000 students turned out and voted to support any strike by professors and other collage workers, to back the general strike and to launch a 48-hour student strike of their own. After about 50 students decided to extend a protest by sleeping at the college gates overnight, thousands more decided to join them over the next two days.

The government struck back with an attempt to intimidate the student protesters with police violence. After students at the Canóvanas school tried to throw eggs at Fortuño, police brutally assaulted them. Meanwhile, Miguel Muñoz, interim president of UPR, met with police superintendent José Figueroa Sancha. Soon afterward Muñoz announced that all UPR campuses would be closed from October 12-16. Police are guarding the campuses' entrances to prevent students from using them as a mobilizing point for the general strike.

The university administration and the government are imposing censorship, and intend to prevent protests and violently attack demonstrators in order to avoid a bigger uprising in the country," said Giovanni Roberto, spokesperson for the Organización Socialista (OSI) and a student at UPR's Faculty of Education. "It's evident that the university administration recognizes that UPR is close to a general strike."

Even before the strike began, the biggest shopping center in Puerto Rico, Plaza las Américas, announced it would close on October 15. A complex with 300 stores that employs some 10,000 people, Plaza las Américas was to be a rallying point for unions during the general strike--and employers evidently concluded that it was better to close voluntarily rather than be shut down by strike supporters.

The association of construction contractors released a statement that they expected the general strike would cost the Puerto Rican economy some $180 million--a substantial sum for an economy the size of the island's.

In another sign of the mass support for the strike, the archbishop of Puerto Rico, Roberto Gonzáles, said that the workers' protest is a "legitimate" effort to keep the government from carrying out firings that will have "negative consequences for individuals and their families."

In the view of Puerto Rico's socialists and left-wing activists, the strike marks a renewal of mass struggle that has the potential to shake up the island's politics. As Carlos Juan Irizarry wrote for the newspaper Socialismo Internacional:

Puerto Rico is at a historic moment, a moment of great suffering that also presents us with an opportunity to fight and to rise up together against the government and the oppressive system. The only way to stop [Law 7] is if we organize ourselves and show that we have power. We are not going to take any more abuse.







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