Nicaragua
Peasant and Worker Struggles at a Crossroads: 3. The Urban Movement: Out from Under the FSLN’s Wing
Envío team
During the Sandinista administration, the union movement reached organizational levels previously unknown in Nicaragua. Nonetheless, the top-down relationship between the FSLN and the Sandinista unions did not permit the latter to learn the necessary lessons of battle; in their relations with the government they were neutralized under the conception that no contradictions can exist between workers and a revolutionary state. The unions were organized to do little more than mobilize the masses to carry out tasks that the revolution demanded—as defined by the FSLN National Directorate. Dedicated to this taskmaster's job, union leaders paid insufficient attention to the workers' political-ideological formation.
The consequences of all this were a lack of autonomy and the passivity of the union base, which waited for its leaders to resolve all problems. When the revolution fell into crisis due to various well-known factors such as the war, inflation and the blockade, contradictions between the workers' specific interests and the Sandinista state's new economic measures became manifest. In many cases decisions made on party orientations went directly against the workers. This only became more accentuated when the FSLN lost the 1990 elections.
New challenges bring changes The Sandinista union movement went into a tailspin with the electoral loss. Not only did it lose a patron state, but even before it could recover from that shock, it was hit with massive layoffs, plant closings, salary freezes and drastically reduced social benefits—particularly in the state's administrative bureaucracy and productive holdings, where Sandinista unions were dominant. If that were not enough, the new neoliberal government set about beheading the Sandinista unions to remove all possible obstacles to carrying out its economic plans. To face this crisis and its new challenges, the industrial union federations and their umbrella organization, the Sandinista Workers Confederation (CST), were forced to undergo major transformations.
The biggest one was the struggle for autonomy from the FSLN, as a means to both gain credibility with alienated workers and defend their interests—against the FSLN leadership's contradictory positions as much as against the government's economic measures. FSLN leaders soon started questioning the CST's new unwillingness to submit to party orientations. In turn, CST leaders began to complain of openly anti-union sectors in the Sandinista Assembly, who censured their independent positions and public criticism of some FSLN leaders. When the National Workers Front (FNT) was formed during the uprisings of May and July 1990 as a broader umbrella of pro-Sandinista unions than those in the industrial CST structure, it took positions that were even more radical. The imposition of FSLN influence in union decisions during those disruptive events had negative repercussions among the workers.
Workers at the base have changed. In these new circumstances, they are no longer willing to be cannon fodder if they cannot clearly see the benefits of a given action. This led the CST to begin making decisions only after consulting the base. It also began to take even firmer autonomous positions. It now insists, for example, that a national union leader can no longer also be a major party leader.
In addition, the CST has moved to establish alliances with other union sectors, both to unify and strengthen workers' struggles and to counter the government's calculated divisionist tactics. This step required moving beyond the post-election political revanchism growing out of society's extreme polarization. The end of heavy-handed turf struggles, in turn, has resulted in the growth of at least 70% of the unions in the CST; workers once disaffected by the acrimony now feel the unions are genuinely getting down to the business of representing their quite critical interests.
The CST sees this alliance with the base of other union federations as a key instrument of struggle. Francisco Somoza Saborio, union leader at the Germán Pomares sugar refinery in Chinandega, explains that unity is fundamental to the success of the sugar workers' demands, that their struggle is not along party lines, but against the capitalist system that exploits them. He believes that the FSLN is losing its leadership position because it has tried to corral workers' struggles instead of supporting them. For example, it tried to halt the workers' occupation of the Pomares refinery.
Recent experiences, contrary positions Not all has been unity in the Sandinista union movement, however. Different positions have emerged regarding the correct action to be taken. The differences are based largely on factors such as the strategic strength or vulnerability of the given union or federation and what the specific labor sector has to win or lose.
The movement against the government's neoliberal measures was given guidelines for a possible strategy last fall. The Concertación Accords signed between the government and the FSLN provided a legal framework of peaceful methods for union struggles, which the CST began to implement to get the government to comply with the specific negotiated accords it signed with them. What the CST soon discovered, however, was that the government did not react to such methods. Instead, it just tied up the unions in endless negotiations, while at the workplace it blithely carried out massive layoffs, making sure the sweep included the activist local union heads.
The government not only failed to comply with the letter of the accords; it also violated their spirit—for example by draining state-held enterprises economically before turning any shares over to the workers as agreed. This led the industrial unions to adopt new tactics. Transportation Federation leader Roberto González says that the effort to wear down the unions in negotiations that went nowhere left no alternative for survival but to apply stronger methods, such as combining strikes with takeovers of the workplace in which the workers kept the operation running. "We've only succeeded in negotiating with the government by putting the heat on," González says. The CST unions have accompanied a staged escalation of such combined tactics with a mature and flexible negotiation policy. Union leaders do not discard the need to negotiate, but as long as government representatives assume a confrontational stance that hurts workers' interests, they strive to hold the highest pressure cards possible when they sit down to negotiate, independent of how fair and reasonable their demands are.
The unions in ENABUS (the state's public transportation enterprise), Aeronica (the national airline), ENABAS (the state grain agency) and Managua's international airport have been fighting for two solid years to force the government to fulfill its agreement to reactivate these enterprises and comply with the collective bargaining agreements. Aeronica was the most dramatic case: while the union was negotiating with CORNAP (the state entity that administers public corporations) over a decision to close the airline, the government went behind its back and sold the state's shares to TACA, El Salvador's national airline. It also refused to pay the laid-off workers the severance pay due them. To demonstrate the union's determination to fight the government policy of intense pressure and vitiating negotiations, outraged workers drove two Aeronica planes onto the international airport's main runway and punctured their tires. Forced to respond to a strong Sandinista outcry after it jailed the workers responsible, a partial solution was negotiated which included their prompt release.
Base-level union leaders of the Sugar Workers Federation say that only such forceful actions have had any success, showing that peaceful struggle "doesn't work with this government; it doesn't get results." Given noncompliance by CONAZUCAR, the state sugar agency, with agreements to privatize shares of its refineries to the workers, the federation decided to hit the government economically and politically at the peak of the sugar harvest. It carefully prepared the conditions for a national strike, in alliance with the right-wing Confederation of Trade Union Unity and a faction of the National Workers Confederation. With strong solidarity from various sectors of Managua's population, the striking sugar workers succeeded in getting 27 delegations of diverse social sectors to camp out in the park directly across the street from the presidential building, blocking traffic on the avenue for 10 days. This militant attitude led to a successful negotiation of the sugar workers' demands.
One seemingly obvious lesson the unions have had to learn by experience is the value of striking by sector, not by workplace. In the latter case, the government can morally and economically wear down the strikers by simply closing the enterprise and leaving them jobless. The textile union federation learned this lesson the hard way, since Nicaragua's textile plants are obsolete and unprofitable. Closing one is no loss to the government, and may even make it more attractive to a private buyer.
Another equally obvious lesson is that consensus at the base is essential to undertaking a given struggle. Experience has demonstrated that with anything less the action will fail. As with the lesson mentioned above, this was not something the union movement was forced to learn when it had the state's support.
The value put on different methods of struggle used in the past two years depends largely on the sector of workers implementing them. In particular, state employees have a radically different view than factory workers.
State employee unions have increasingly opted for the strictly legal road, calling for negotiations based on little more than partial work stoppages and the threat of escalation. They claim that this is a time for legal struggle, and they do not intend to swim against the current. Behind that lofty claim lies the fact that the government is permanently on the lookout to shrink state payrolls. Unwilling to risk their jobs, state employees do not support occupations and other illegal actions or threats of violence such as those carried out by the sugar workers.
Late in the first year of the new government, the nation's health workers went on a strike that reached the point of occupying hospitals and only offering emergency service. The strike, which combined wage demands with the demand for medical supplies in the empty hospitals and health centers, lasted weeks, and was joined by everyone from orderlies to surgeons. It even included a hunger strike that went on for over three weeks and threatened the life of one elderly nurse. During this time, the government did nothing, because it did not consider health a "strategic" sector. The Minister of Health simply repeated that the health workers could feel free to propose a different division of the ministry's budget pie, but that nothing would make the pie grow. An eleventh hour solution was only negotiated on the eve of a major conference to which international dignitaries had been invited; the strategic issue that drove the government to the bargaining table was political embarrassment.
The state employee unions now carefully follow negotiation mechanisms established by the Ministry of Labor. They admit that the country's labor laws are deficient, but, if rigorously applied, can help sustain a series of workers' gains and demands. Their unwillingness to go outside of the legal framework does not mean that state workers have become docile, however. They understand that such a strategy requires becoming thoroughly familiar with their legal rights, to counter any illegal maneuvers by the government and thus expose its bourgeois essence. As long as any proposed action has legal backing, state workers will mobilize around it. By the same token, if 60% of the workers reject the state enterprise's proposal after negotiations, they will strike, since they have the support of the majority.
The main demands of the state banking employees and those in Telcor, the state telecommunications enterprise, are centered on job security, salary adjustments and specific collective bargaining agreements. According to Telcor Union secretary general Mario Malespín, there is generalized sentiment among the employees that they are going through a profound crisis and everyone is fighting to survive, which leads to individualistic attitudes of protecting one's own job. In his judgment, this is a consequence of the workers' lack of political-ideological formation.
The country's complex political reality is reflected in these struggles of the urban union movement. Roberto González, general secretary of the Transport Federation, appraises the strong pressure methods of the sugar workers, the ENABUS workers and others as the "principal form of defense" of wage laborers. He considers these methods valid and believes they should be employed, when combined with negotiation. Telcor union head Mario Malespín, in contrast, fears a squandering of what remains of the union movement. He believes that sending workers off into actions of force to halt government policies has, at times, resulted in weakening a sector that was perhaps once much stronger.
Workers on all sides of this debate, however, are clear that the government concedes nothing when they do not mobilize actively to defend their own interests; only when the danger of a strike that could paralyze the functioning of an important economic activity arises does the government become more flexible and conciliatory.
CST Second Congress: Decides on new lines The Sandinista union movement is looking for a new strategy for these new conditions. It is trying to define an alternative program based on its own experiences and is seeking a new identity and new ground rules for continuing the revolution based on the mass movement. The CST's Second Congress, held on April 24-25, defined its challenges and strategic lines of action. The fundamental lines of the new strategy are:
* fight for the construction of a democratic and popular national project;
* build the CST's own identity and its own social project, which will allow it to autonomously negotiate its interests with the country's social and political forces;
* strengthen unionism in the strategic sectors of the national economy, in their direct struggle against capital;
* defend the specific rights and demands of workers who, under the current circumstances, have become strategic;
* keep alive and use strikes and occupations as instruments of worker pressure given the logic of the government and private bosses of beating down unions with any method available to them.
The congress summarized the union movement's major overall achievements in these two years of struggle under a neoliberal government as the concerted defense of workers' interests and the survival and strengthening of the movement itself in the face of the government's offensive to liquidate it. With respect to specific achievements, the congress highlighted the struggle for worker participation in ownership by the Sugar Worker and Transport Federations, both of which successfully insisted on a single negotiation for their respective industries as a whole rather than enterprise by enterprise, as the government wanted. In this way, the workers succeeded in nailing down their rights to a percentage of shares in significantly concentrated percentages. In the transport sector, for example, they got 100% of four enterprises, and in sugar 70%, 65% and 30%, respectively, of three refineries. In the Concertación Accords, it had been agreed in principle that workers would receive a maximum 25% of industries being privatized, but had that been spread out among all enterprises in anyone category, the workers would have been powerless minority shareholders in each enterprise.
The other side of the coin has been the government's response to the union fights. It has demonstrated three styles, depending on the strength of the workers' struggle.
Struggles characterized by strong pressure, combining strikes, occupations and negotiation. When the struggle is carried out by sector or federation, and is imposed forcefully and with worker unity, despite ideological differences, the government has responded positively and the workers won the objectives they had set. This has been the case with the Sugar and Transport Federations.
Strikes carried out by individual enterprises. In these cases, for example at the state printing company Companic or in individual regional ENABAS outlets, workers' demands have not been met. On the contrary, the workers were violently repressed, forcibly removed from the occupied buildings, jailed and fired.
Moderate actions and negotiations in strategic sectors. For these sectors only, short-term work stoppages combined with negotiations have resulted in minor gains such as the lifting of orders for massive layoffs, rehiring of fired workers and a stop to systematic decapitalization. Examples of such successes can be found in the struggles at such strategic locations as the International Airport, the Central Bank and ENABUS. In the later case, a fleet of new buses on the brink of being given to private bus lines was turned over to the state bus system instead, as originally planned.
This initial analysis only presents some elements for understanding the urban union struggles of the past two years, and particularly those of recent months; in no way does it pretend to exhaust the topic. There are many open questions about the opposing opinions of wageworkers and salaried employees in the state sector. As a confederation of federations, how far should the CST go in trying to reconcile the different struggle methods? Does the search for autonomy within the CST and for a new identity genuinely take these differences into account?
The answers to these and other questions will be answered with time, experience and a greater accumulation of errors and successes. But two things are already clear. The fact that in its Second Congress the CST presented a struggle strategy for the union movement, when the FSLN has not yet done so, demonstrates the degree to which the union movement has recovered its strength and the level of autonomy it has achieved in this recent period.
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