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NEWS & LETTERS, May-June 2010
Colombian workers tossed on a trash heap
Cali, Colombia--On March 1, 300 registered recycling workers of Cali took to the streets to demand a day of international recognition and to denounce the government of Alvaro Uribe. In addition to stripping workers of their rights and social welfare guarantees (abolishing labor contracts, job benefits and social security), the president has denied workers their right to a pension starting in 2010, and has cut the right to healthcare for the majority of Colombians.
Now he's attacking the street workers, criminalizing their activity. From now on the lucrative trash and recycling business will be reserved for the young multimillionaire children of Uribe.
The recycling workers have emerged as a social force in the last 20 years. They clear the scrap metal, in the congested streets, while breathing in the plastic and smoke fumes. The majority live in the streets, in overcrowded slums, by the freeway, next to sewage pipes spouting dirty water, in flood zones, in high-risk areas.
Recycling and street vending are the final refuges of a labor force that refuses to beg for jobs because they don't exist anymore. They are everywhere: former workers of what was in the 1980s called the "industrial sector," which neoliberalism has eradicated. What had been considered fundamental rights have now become privatized, like healthcare, education, public housing and public works.
They are farmers, Afro-Colombians and displaced indigenous peoples, thrown off their own land where they grew the food they needed for their families to survive; thrown off their land by traditional and emerging capitalists, legal and "illegal," national and transnational.
Almost 10 million people, 20% of the population, live on an income of less than $2 a day. They don't figure into the official statistics or consumer reports. In addition, 30% of households bring home less than twice the minimum wage. That is half of what a family needs.
Colombia now has the highest unemployment in the region, rising to 11.1% at the end of 2009. Cities like Pereira have surpassed 20% unemployment according to the Administration of Statistics. But all of these numbers are lies. They mask the magnitude of unemployment, as they include people who work one day a week, and those who sell trinkets, as "employed." For every 100 steady workers, there are 109 "informal" jobless workers (see Desde abajo, No. 53, 2010).
The Left here doesn't see organization, unity and mobilization of workers like the recycling workers as a priority. Much less do they prioritize alternatives of truly mass power to permit a confrontation with the oligarchic imperialist project. The Left still doesn't believe in the capacity of the masses to create something new and change the conditions of their own existence.
Workers' unions, now undergoing a process of extinction, don't do anything for workers anymore. The unions with their isolated and petty economic struggles only serve to maintain the status quo of exploitation imposed by capital in the last decade; at this point they've lost almost all of the gains won by the workers since the middle of the last century
--Quintín Mina
Translated from Spanish by Brown Douglas
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