Bosses’ Minimum Wage Increase Attacks Workers here ♦ Contradictions of Imperialism here ♦
Minimum wage:We Need a Communist World Without Money
EL SALVADOR, August 3— “The worker leadership has met recently, on two different days, with six workers from the factory, to put together an anti-boss strategy that shows the position of the International Communist Workers’ Party (ICWP) at this time about the minimum wage increase,” said a worker leader.
The government of President Nayib Bukele proposed a 20% increase (about $60) to the minimum wage, effective August 1, 2021. The bosses are supported by the government within this capitalist system. They will get a subsidy to increase the minimum wage.
This announcement at the end of June triggered price increases of more than 20% in the markets, the basic food basket and medicines.
“Those of us who earn more than the minimum wage are not going to receive an increase in wages, but we will see an increase in the prices of beans,” said a worker.
Now the bosses are demanding more production from us and threatening layoffs because of the minimum wage increase. We have to fight to get rid of the wage system and produce to meet the needs of everyone. We workers organized in ICWP must have more meetings every week to organize and fight for a system without wages or money: communism.
In El Salvador, when workers are laid off, bosses must pay them “compensation’’ for the time they worked at the factory. Now the factory bosses argue that they only have to compensate them for the six months from January to June, due to the increase in the minimum wage that begins on August 1. According to them, the buyers of their products will not accept new prices. They used their capitalist laws so that the workers would not rebel against them, and they have terminated their six-month contracts.
“It is unbearable that after compensation the bosses decide to choose how many, and who will stay working in the factories. We must organize and fight against the bosses’ system,” said a comrade who has worked in the factory’s packing area for years.
Part of the union leadership had already negotiated the strategy with the bosses to sell to the working class. It was signed with the Ministry of Labor through an act that commits the boss to compensate the workers every year. But with the wage increase that has not even been given yet, they immediately decided to compensate the first six months. They blackmailed workers, threatening that, if they did not take the compensation, they would never get it again until the company decides, or their contract is terminated.
The owners know our personal needs. They know well that the high cost of living is becoming more difficult every day, the basic food basket is too high, and that today money is not enough to buy food and medicine.
“The wage only helps us to survive, because we do not know what can happen from now on,” said another comrade reader.
As a Party, we are seeing that our working class also needs more consciousness of the class struggle. We must organize a fierce struggle against the bosses’ laws and their servants.
In the collective meetings, the comrades in the party have taken a more political focus. They have discussed more about the bosses’ attacks on the workers and the need for communist revolution.
The bosses have not taken into account the ideological response that the women and men workers could have. Every day workers are responding, due to the communist leadership of ICWP and because they are reading Red Flag
The Party leadership has thought of extending more communist dialogue in the face of this opportunistic attack. We plan to carry out meetings in which we make known to our working class the laws of dialectics, to push forward our revolutionary struggle inside and outside the factory for the implementation of communism. Reading and distributing Red Flag and organizing in ICWP, the struggle will advance.
El Salvador and Ukraine: Imperialism and Its Contradictions
In El Salvador, the contradictions between the main imperialists are clearly sharpening as they try to maintain or win control over each other.
At the same time, the needs of the working class are also deepening economically, socially and ideologically. Faced with this reality, we workers have no alternative but to again take up the struggle in defense of the working class that the old communist parties have abandoned worldwide. This is precisely the opportunity that our International Communist Workers’ Party gives us by rekindling the fight for communism. We can do this in many ways; for example, by creating communist social networks, and reading online and distributing our Red Flag newspaper.
As the international working class, we must be clear that what is happening now is part of the imperialist struggle allied with the Salvadoran ruling class to control the wealth that the working class produces.
No empire is good. They have the same goals: to get maximum profits by exploiting the working class. In addition, El Salvador and Central America as a whole are a strategic geographic area for both the North American empire and its rivals, the Chinese and Russian empire, which are vying for world hegemony.
The messages from the US empire to President Nayib Bukele are clear. One top official recently sent to El Salvador is Victoria Nuland. She is the same US imperialist politician who tried to persuade Victor Yanukovych, former president of Ukraine, to turn his back on the Russians and thus become part of the European-North American bloc.
Yanukovych ignored the message and a year later was overthrown by his adversaries, supported by the US.
Similarly, Nuland said that El Salvador does not have the option to choose between China and the US.
“We have a commitment, and we will continue to improve relations,” the US charge d’affaires in El Salvador also stated in an interview on a Salvadoran television channel.
Nayib Bukele is supported by a group of big capitalists, whose wealth comes from exploiting workers.
Any reforms promoted by this sector of the bourgeoisie that claims to benefit workers (educational reform, access to internet networks, etc.) are secondary. These initiatives seek not to improve the conditions of the workers, but to deepen their exploitation to help the bourgeoisie accumulate more wealth.
What is similar between what happened in Ukraine and what is happening in El Salvador today? It is the political and ideological manipulation of the apparatuses of capitalism and imperialism. They want to confuse the working class by making them believe that the transformation processes they currently offer will benefit the workers.
In reality the empires and their local bourgeois allies seek to continue exploiting the workers and seize not only natural resources and markets, but also geopolitically strategic areas. That’s why the working class must not support any capitalist empire or government. They look out only for their class interests and we, therefore, as the working class, have to look out only for our class interests.
The alternative to the warmongering avalanche that lies ahead is to build our party and to pre-empt their war with communist revolution.
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