Panama City/Prensa Latina
With calls for popular unity, labor organizations in Panama today called for a massive march on May 1, International Labor Day, to demand freedom of association.
In a press conference, Nelva Reyes, leader of the National Council of Organized Workers (Conato) specified that, a few days before the general elections, this is one of the main demands to the Government after constant abuses against the formation of unions and non-compliance by of the employers of collective agreements.
The immediate departure from the Isthmus country of the Canadian transnational First Quantum, after the Supreme Court of Justice, at the end of last year, declared an agreement signed with the State unconstitutional, will be another of the protesters’ demands, he added.
Reyes stressed that the next Executive that is elected must reduce the price of medicines, respect educators and in the face of threats from some presidential candidates against that sector, he indicated, they will find us again in the streets in defense of the most basic rights.
For his part, the general secretary of the National Confederation of Independent Trade Union Unity (Conusi), Marco Andrade, stressed that the walk that will start next Wednesday morning from the emblematic Belisario Porras park and to the Plaza 5 de Mayo, in this capital, will also be the scene for solidarity with Panamanian builders, whose bank accounts have been arbitrarily closed by the state Savings Bank.
That is the bill that the economic elites and financial mafias want to charge the patriots who defended in the streets the rejection of open pit metal mining that steals the country’s natural resources and destroys nature, as he explained.
Andrade announced that next June he will travel to Geneva (Switzerland) to present this and other complaints to the International Labor Organization (ILO), such as threats to restrict the right to strike and the privatization of the Social Security Fund, as well as with parametric measures to extract their benefit programs from the current structural and financial crisis.
When asked by Prensa Latina about the impact of the upcoming elections, which began with irregularities in the Electoral Court with early voting, Reyes and Andrade each indicated that they will be vigilant of the results, but clear that, of the eight candidates for the presidential seat, the economist Maribel Gordón and her Dignified Life Plan is the only one who has accompanied them in their struggles and social demands.
138 years after the feat of Chicago (United States), this will be the most worthy tribute, they pointed out, to the heroes and martyrs of that general strike promoted by the labor movement demanding an eight-hour day, and which ended with a scandalous repression.
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