“Give me a red ICWP shirt” here ♦ Persecutions and arbitrary arrests here ♦
ICWP Factory Workers Fight Boss-Union Attacks
EL SALVADOR— “Give us some Red Flag t-shirts (with the ICWP logo). Today we’re going to wear them. That way the bosses can see that we don’t agree with them,” two young maquila workers told a comrade from the International Communist Workers’ Party in the maquila factories (sweatshops). The young workers wore them proudly inside the factory throughout the day.
That day they were challenging the bosses and the trade unions for their attack on workers’ schedules. Workers in this factory work Monday through Friday from 7:00 am to 4:00 pm and on Saturdays from 7:00 am to 11:00 am.
The man from Human Resources told us that we were all going to sign a paper agreeing to work on Saturday, June 11, from 7:00 am to 4:00 pm, and have Saturday, June 18, off.
Faced with this, a group of workers joined us, and we all refused to sign this paper, because we realized that it was in favor of the bosses.
They needed to export merchandise that we produce, and they were doing it that way so they didn’t have to pay us overtime. They used the lie that it was to give us Father’s Day off as an unpaid holiday. However, it wasn’t for a celebration, but for the profits they wanted to make the previous weekend.
When the bosses realized that a group of workers refused to sign, they called on the union leaders to talk their members into signing.
The union used a strategy, saying that if we didn’t sign the agreement and left at 11:00 am, our pay for that day plus the seventh day (which is understood to complete a full week) would be deducted because of the four hours we didn’t work. That was how they forced the workers to sign.
Out of seven hundred workers, only fifteen of us refused to sign and decided to leave work at 11:00 am.
We hoped that there would be more Party members and others who would reject this action by the bosses and unions. But they were afraid of threats and reprisals from the bosses, working hand in hand with the unions.
“Here it became clear that every union, no matter how militant it claims to be, is also part of the bosses’ plans,” emphasized a woman leader of ICWP.
“But we have learned the lesson that the bosses and the unions are wings of the same bird,” said a male worker.
Men and women workers around the world must continue studying Political Economy, the laws of Marxism and the communist articles in our Red Flag newspaper, so as not to fall into the traps of these sell-outs.
These actions inside the factories are creating new leaders of the working class with the vision of a communist world free from the chains of capitalist exploitation.
—Comrades of the Maquilas
El Salvador: Persecutions and Arbitrary Arrests
Honest workers who fight to survive under a fascist capitalist government that puts a gag law to silence our voice. A capitalist system, where you live without rights.
There are many cases of our working-class brothers and sisters who have themselves, or have had family members, arbitrarily and unjustifiably captured during this exceptional regime (martial law).
I had a meeting with B, a worker who sympathizes with communist ideas. At the meeting I shared our Red Flag newspaper with her. At the same time, I told her that we are an international party.
She liked it a lot and she told me, “I want to tell you our story so that other parts of the world realize what we are experiencing in our country with this exceptional regime.”
B told me that her nephew Diego was unjustly captured at the end of April. His story fills her with much pain, because he is a 17-year-old boy, autistic, a farm worker from San Sebastián Salitrillo in the department of Santa Ana.
Despite his autism, he is a great worker of the land. He farms and helps his mother in whatever way he can. One day he took the corn to grind and, since he was hungry, he was eating a mango. At that moment he was unjustly captured for no apparent reason.
So far nothing has been done. Under the ‘law of exception’ no one has the right or the means to raise their voice.
Worker B told me “I don’t agree with anything that is happening and I still criticize everything this government does, but I can neither say nor do anything. We cannot speak but we can end up imprisoned “
There are many more cases just like Diego’s and that is why we continue to fight for our Communist Revolution and break the chains to which we are subjected. It is the right time to mobilize the masses and move forward together.
Long live the communist fight!
—A young comrade