These are recurrent words and references uttered by new union formations currently being created, both at the extreme ends of ideological governance. Used in one case to agree; on the other to disagree. But these words always serve as a north that guides those who want to go there or that determines where the south is, the other way.
On the left, with roots in the MRPP, the Sindicato do Proletariado was founded in May, and on the right, André Ventura, leader of Chega, announced a few days ago his intention to create a new trade union federation, to be called Solidarity. (Spain’s sister party do Chega, Vox, has a labor structure of the same name, the obvious inspiration being the union headquarters, led by Lech Walesa, who led the struggle in Poland in the 1980s to end to communism).
“Class struggle” and then Marx.
Paulo Castro, age 37, air maintenance technician at TAP, coordinates the direction of the Sindicato do Proletariado. The union does not hide what it comes up with, neither in the name nor in the symbol, a red five-point star with, drawn in yellow, a hammer and a cogwheel crossed in it, a sort of workers’ version of the old communist hammer and sickle. “Yes”, he tells DN, “this language is sociologically correct. There is class struggle. The Marxist reading is correct and remains very topical”.
A few days ago, André Ventura in an interview on RTP – Chega did not want to talk to DN about this new project – said quite the opposite, although he used the same references: “Class struggle? Workers against entrepreneurs? No! We all want together: a new union model that is not centered on Marxism, on the traditional class struggle, one where entrepreneurs are bad, economic growth is bad and what’s good is that we all win 500 euros and we are all happy.”
Now, “all together”, employers and employees, is what João Castro sees as an impossibility, an unwavering believer in the idea that “the interests of workers are incompatible with the interests of employers”.
Therefore, a right-wing union like the one Chega wants to launch represents, in his view, just a “contradiction in terms”, and should be seen as such by workers in general: “They’re not against pay cuts, they don’t support workers’ rights.”
And who says ‘wage cut’, says pension cuts. André Ventura, by the way, seems alert to the alleged damage that Passos Coelho has caused by the possibility of the confirmation, now, of a right-wing trade union movement, when he made a deep commitment in his government (2011-2015) to go “outside the troika” . At the time, Ventura says, Passos made “a lot of mistakes that the right still pays for, like cutting pensions.” And so the new Solidarity will be of a “people’s right”, as opposed to an “elitist right”, only on the side of companies and the cut of pensions”.
“Elitist” and “bureaucratic”. These are two qualifiers that João Castro uses to classify the action of the current union centers, CGTP and UGT. And during the thing (2015-2019) it only got worse: “The CGTP took a passive stance”; and as for the UGT, nothing would be expected as it is closely associated with the PS and “the PS is right”. Today, says the coordinator of the Union of the Proletariat, “there is a great mistrust” of the trade union system and nothing was contradicted during the thing, “which benefited neither the workers nor the unions”. Moreover, union negotiations seem to be entirely focused on social dialogue, as “most of the economy is out of this world”.
If for the Union of the Proletariat right-wing trade union work is an impossibility and left-hand trade union work is not practiced, the truth for Chega is that there is currently only left-wing trade union work – and it is to try to fight this monopoly that André Ventura says he wants Solidarity to create.
“The streets are not left-wing,” he says, in the sense that they can’t just be left-wing. And Chega’s union front will be born precisely because “On the right, there is no culture of protest and demand, and that is negative. The right must win this case from pairing it with workers who earn poorly.”
As for the number of supporters of each of the organizations, neither one nor the other helps. Castro says this data is “confidential,” but acknowledges that subscriber numbers are still “low,” not least because the union was only born last May (the official birthday date is May 1, Labor Day). As for Ventura, he speaks of “tens, hundreds” of Chega voters with union interests who have already come to him to protest because they don’t feel represented in the existing unions. The sectors in which there will be more interest, Chega’s leader said, are teachers, security forces, workers and health workers.
In this chapter – of the “preferred goals” – the talk of the union of the proletariat is quite different. João Castro speaks of a possible set of branches “chosen according to a class vocation”. In other words, “the most unprotected, the most excluded from unions and politics, the most precarious, the least paid”, recruited in industries such as industry, cleaning personnel, civil construction, trade and security. And as for the struggles, these will be “all deemed necessary”, with “openness to all tactics”, with legal support for members being one of the priorities.
What both structures are anything but innovative lies in their party roots – copying what has always happened in the CGTP (dominated by the PCP) and in the UGT (PS and PSD).
André Ventura announced at a press conference the creation of Solidariedade, presenting Chega as “the first right-wing party to participate directly and directly in the issues of the labor and trade union world in Portugal”.
In the case of the Union of the Proletariat, João Castro assumes head-on that he has been a member of the MRPP for two years and that the organization operates from the party’s headquarters in Lisbon. The party achieved its worst ever result in the last parliamentary elections (11,200 votes, that is 0.2% of the vote) – and João Castro hopes that the militant rejuvenation that will take place through his new union in the future will prevent the announced death of a deeply demobilized and aging party.
Source: DN
