Maquila garment workers lead San Salvador May Day march, 2016
EL SALVADOR, August 30— “At last we have a newspaper in our hands again,” said a worker, “and today it is accompanied by masks.” After many months of not receiving the printed Red Flag, the comrades are enthusiastically and gladly taking it.
How positive were the comments of women and men workers in the maquilas! “We sincerely thank the Party because during these days of crisis, they have been watching over us. The boss gave us cloth masks while the International Communist Workers’ Party gave us surgical masks and high quality KN95 masks when we needed them most.”
We have seen how the capitalists don’t care about workers’ health but only about their profits. There are workers with chronic diseases, diagnosed by doctors, who still didn’t receive any wages during the entire quarantine. The bosses tried to silence their voices by giving them a miserable bag of food valued at $12 every two weeks. Today they went back to work.
The capitalist system is the worst enemy of the working class. With this factory re-opening, no one spoke of social distancing. The maquilas garment factories in the free-trade zone have been opening massively as if nothing will happen, as if there were no pandemic.
We workers organized in the ICWP will continue to struggle to recruit more workers to the Party to put an end to all these abuses against our class with communist revolution.
—Communist factory organizer