Hello Chris Bailey,
I wrote this article ten days ago and sent it around. You may want to post it somewhere, even if it is a bit dated. Please show it to Jordi Martorell. I teach at the University of Puerto Rico Mayaguez campus and was involved in the local support of the march/stoppage. I refer to the action as a march and work stoppage, as opposed to a strike, because I believe that most Puerto Ricans see it that way. We stopped work to go march. A proper strike vote was not requested from any rank and file that I am aware of. The word in Spanish was "paro," not "huelga." I believe the distinction is important because the people were consciously objecting the privatization policy of the government, not a particular labor-management issue. Your articles may give the impression that there was a strike action against a bank. Fomento is not a regular bank, it is the Banco Gubernamental de Fomento (Government Development Bank), a government agency whose employees decided to join the general stoppage in support of the PR Telephone Company workers and against privatization. We can talk about it some more if you are interested.
Regarding your mention of the "Workers Party," the Spanish version says that it is the Macheteros. Regardless of which Macheteros branch it is, this is a bit deceiving. The Macheteros is not a real labor party. One side of them remains an underground movement. The other is a political organization that promotes revolution a la '68. I really have no objection to their participation, but presenting either Machetero group side by side with a labor union is asking for trouble and may poison the discussion. The Macheteros speak the truth and have very good positions, but because of their past actions, they remain at the fringes of political discussion and are (unfairly) regarded by many as merely a terrorist group.
Finally a word on the word "paro." In colloquial Iberian Spanish, "paro" has come to mean "unemployment." In American Spanish it is still closer to "stoppage" or "halt."
PLEASE READ THIS PARAGRAPH. A group of professors at UPR Mayaguez is trying to research privatizations in general and telephone companies in particular. Could you send me some articles on privatization around the world or let me know where to find them? We do have internet access, albeit dreadfully slow. I am trying to find hard quotable data such as telephone rate increases following privatization, disasters of every kind caused directly by corporate greed, and other horror stories. By "quotable" I mean articles written by university professors, researchers and the like, or published in established newspapers and magazines. These may go as far left as, say, The Nation, but I really cannot quote a publication by the Communist Party of France or Australia. (They offered.) Regardless of its veracity, it would not convince anyone. Government propaganda has a lot of people thinking that it will be all rosy after privatization, and they can quote The Economist and kindred other neoliberal rags.
In solidarity,
Jose Davila <j_davila@rumac.upr.clu.edu>
by Jose B. Davila-Acaron
On Wednesday, October 1st, 1997, most of the Puerto Rican public sector stopped. A coalition of labor unions, community organizations and civic groups had called for a one-day, island-wide, work stoppage and march to protest government plans to privatize the Puerto Rico Telephone Company (PRTC). Chanting "No a la venta" (No to the sale), about 100,000* demonstrators marched from Dos Hermanos bridge, gateway to the islet of San Juan, to the rally site next to the commonwealth capitol. This figure is impressive for an island of 3.6 million, especially considering that private sector unions were not officially participating, and that it was held on a workday. The San Juan events were a peaceful, massive repudiation of privatization and the neoliberal mentality. Elsewhere, government offices and public schools reported high absenteeism; and the University of Puerto Rico was shut down by well organized students, workers and professors opposed to the proposed sale of all PRTC stock to a private corporation.
Privatization mania in Puerto Rico afflicts the populist, pro-commonwealth-status Popular Democratic Party (PDP) almost as much as the right-wing, pro-statehood New Progressive Party (NPP). Since the late eighties these parties have facilitated the privatization of the public housing corporation and of many regional hospitals, the partial privatization of the Aqueducts and Sewers Authority, and the construction of a private toll bridge (with profit guarantees for the owners). Among the electoral politics groups, only the Puerto Rican Independence Party officially opposes privatization, but it has not led the opposition to the privatization attempts. The municipal governments are not immune to the plague. An increasing number of city health services have been entrusted to corporate providers, and garbage collection services are increasingly contracted out to waste-management companies. With privatization seemingly unstoppable, the atmosphere was gloomy through the first half of this year. Toward the end of the summer, news of the proposed PRTC sale turned angst into action, and a union-led United Front Against Privatization was forged. Organized workers mounted a tenacious resistance. It was joined by communities that now suffer from reduced or denied services; and it has enjoyed the solidarity of an increasing number of students, intellectuals and religious leaders who fear a future of corporate domination over public matters. The energetic involvement of university students is particularly refreshing, as they have been relatively inactive during the nineties. Some politicians belatedly expressed tame reservations to the proposed sale.
Government officials and intellectuals of all sorts argued the virtues of private versus public management. Privatization of telephone companies around the world have generally met stiff resistance from workers directly affected, but not from the general public, which has either accepted corporate takeover as a necessity of modern times or has supported it in hopes of improved service. Corporate promises were tempting, as the corporations entered the telecommunications arena in fierce competition for long-distance and unessential services (such as pagers and wireless telephones) reducing prices and showing off their technology. Reality set in after the acquisition of local networks. In Spain, for example, while privatization resulted in lower long-distance rates, local rates rose sharply with no improvement in service quality. The privatized Telefonica Espanola became powerful and profitable. However, instead of investing in infrastructure, it expanded overseas. It acquired the Peruvian telephone company and soon after raised local rates and sacked hundreds of employees, generating protests and civil unrest throughout Peru. In fact, in most countries public service privatization stories vary from the foul-smelling to the nightmarish. In Puerto Rico, the United Front Against Privatization promoted public discussion of the proposed sale, emphasizing social and working-class issues while minimizing discussion of rates and technology. During the campaign it became clear to most Puerto Ricans that corporate takeover of public services would be detrimental to the political and economic health of the island-nation. On October 1st, they showed their numbers.
The nationality sentiment also became an issue. While Puerto Ricans are United States citizens by birth, a majority of us feel that we are a distinct nation. This is true even among those who believe that Puerto Rico should join the US as the fifty-first state. In the first half of this century, the US Congress established federal law jurisdiction over Puerto Rico, which made US corporations feel confortable about investing on the island. Enter International Telephone and Telegraph (ITT), the transnational corporation whose infamous links to the CIA played a role in the 1973 coup d'etat in Chile. During sixty years, ITT enjoyed a monopoly of local and overseas communications throughout most of the island and yet installed only 240,000 telephone lines. In 1974, financially unhealthy and unwilling to invest in new equipment, ITT of Puerto Rico convinced the Commonwealth to buy its stock. Critics of that purchase contended that too much was paid for the assets. The government took over the administration of the newly formed PRTC and turned it into a public corporation. Since then, PRTC installed one and a half million telephone lines, and modernized and digitized the entire system. Today it is a money-making enterprise whose profits revert to public education and other essential services. Not surprisingly, after a twenty-three years of major maintenance and massive capital investment, paid for by Puerto Rican taxpayers, PRTC appeals enormously to the private telecommunications industry. The United Front denounced this corporate-government scheme of selling when in need of maintenance and buying when ready for profit-making. Puerto Rican workers built a productive public corporation from the ruins of a private one. For this reason, today PRTC is widely regarded as part of the Puerto Rican national patrimony. Why sell it?
In 1990 a PDP administration failed in the first attempt to privatize PRTC. Popular opposition stopped it. This time around, however, we may be in for a long fight; the neoliberal muscle is stronger. Shortly after the October 1st demonstration, NPP governor Pedro Rossello announced that the sale of all PRTC stock will be finalized by year's end. With a mantra-like "One million Puerto Ricans voted for me," he explained his disregard for popular sentiment against the sale. This is yet another example of the insufficiency of elections as guarantor of democracy. The persistent efforts of the governor and other government officials seem politically suicidal. In fact, an opinion poll published by the right-leaning daily El Nuevo Dia showed that over two thirds of all voters, and a majority among NPP sympathizers, oppose the sale. One wonders, is there something in it for the middlepeople? The history of corporate-government deals offers plenty of examples of corruption at the highest levels.
I hope the Puerto Rican case will be different. The numbers at the march show that the United Front has succeeded in turning a labor issue into a national issue. The unions have announced that, if the government persists in its privatization efforts, they might call for an all-out strike, that would shut down banks, industry, ports, etc. There are rumors that things may get very hot as early as November. In the end, will the privatization cancer stop growing in Puerto Rico? The manifestations I witnessed on October 1st give reason to believe that this patient may soon force it into remission.
*The figure is proposed by veteran journalist Julio Ghiglioty, of El Nuevo Dia. He points out that, while police superintendent Pedro Toledo estimated attendance at no more than 60,000, the crowd estimation charts and aerial photography methods often used by Toledo himself produce a number close to 100,000.