The recent collective dismissals at the ceramics manufacturer Celima are part of a long list of closures, layoffs, and impositions of “perfect work suspensions” (temporary layoffs) which for the past 5 years have been hanging over the Peruvian working class, especially industrial workers.
By Victor Montes
Because the defeat of collective dismissals is a vital component of struggle for the working class as a whole, we find ourselves in a moment dominated by confusion and a lack of mobilization. This is in large part a consequence of the policies promoted by reformist organizations, including the Communist Party – Unity (PC), Red Fatherland (PR), and their acolytes.
It is crucial, then, to question this policy and open up a discussion among workers who are at the vanguard of the struggle. This will help workers find a path forward for defeating collective dismissals, and, as equally important, encounter solutions to the economic and political crisis that is suffocating the country.
What is at issue with the layoffs?
In the first place, the collective dismissals, layoffs, and closures that have been taking place in the country are part of the deepening deindustrialization and denationalization of the Peruvian economy.
Since the 1990s, under the boots of the Fujimori dictatorship, a model of accumulation was imposed in which the country returned to exporting raw materials, particularly minerals. This lead to the bankruptcy and disappearance of an important sector of the limited national industry that had existed since the 1950s. Today we find ourselves in a new “turn of the screw” in favor of the same model.
However, for the bosses this is not a problem. They are satisfied as long as they can maintain their businesses by hiring workers under worse labor and wage conditions, and become junior partners or executives of the companies that come to replace their old businesses. They would also be pleased with a move into the commercial sector.
On the other hand, for the workers, the closing of factories is a tragedy. This is not because they “love” the factories where they labor. On the contrary, workers hate exploitation. And in that sense, even if they are not fully aware of it, they look for a thousand and one ways to get out of work. That said, it is truly unjust and inhumane that workes are being left without a livelihood for themselves and their families.
The closing of factories, or collective layoffs mean a leap into the void for many workers, as it throws them into informal labor and a greater degree of exploitation and misery.
This is why the struggle against layoffs, collective dismissals, and factory closures is part of the struggle of the entire working class and poor people against imperialist and capitalist domination, which privileges its profits over the lives of people and the development of countries.
What role does reformism play in the struggle against the layoffs?
Like all reformists throughout history, the Communist Party, Red Fatherland and a long etcetera, falsify reality and the concepts with which reality is understood. They do this in order to disarm the working class in its struggle and keep it tied to their own electoral interests.
Thus, while they speak of “unity”, they divide the struggles of the unions, taking their cases separately onto legal terrain. In addition, they have cut themselves off from the popular struggles occuring in Peru’s interior, and they say absolutely nothing about them.
They have demanded the “fall of the Minister of Labor”, to keep quiet about the need to overthrow the government of Boluarte and Congress. The latter are the current guarantors of capitalist and imperialist exploitation in the country. They are the guarantors who, as they have already demonstrated, have imposed themselves with blood and fire and restricted the country’s democratic spaces.
They call the congressmen and organizations that are completely adapted to the bosses’ legality their “friends” and “allies”. These are the same politicians who have never spoke up about their support for the end of exploitation, but they are key for reformists because they make electoral alliances possible.
But fundamentally, their understanding of “struggle” is based on lawsuits, which is their only real strategy of action in the face of layoffs. Under this framework, they take the class out of the streets and away from direct actions. In this way, they weaken the struggle, which is prolonged in time and demands expenses. These are two factors that favor companies as opposed to workers.
This is precisely the reason why, for those who have a Marxist and class understanding, it is clear that the bosses’ justice, where everything is bought and sold, is not the terrain on which the workers’ struggle develops naturally.
Although the bourgeois and bosses’ legality has had to recognize the conquests that the working class has wrested from its domination throughout history, at the same time, it starts from the recognition of the capitalist rights of the bosses above any others, beginning with their right to private property, the means of production (factories, mines, etc.) and for that very reason, to exploitation.
By putting the working class struggle within the framework of bourgeois legality, they keep the action of the working class under control. In that sense, they keep the working class trapped in the myth that the problem of the dismissals will be solved with a “good legal defense”, while life drags the workers to look for new jobs and to abandon the direct struggle in the streets. As a result, this facilitates the materialization of the dismissals, and the continuity of the government. In other words, what it least wants is a front of conflicts opened up by the industrial working class.
What is the way forward for putting an end to collective layoffs?
The struggle against layoffs has, therefore, a set of characteristics that unify workers’ and popular indignation.
On the one hand, it reveals the bosses’ desperation for guaranteeing their profits at the cost of the lives of workers and their families.
On the other hand, it takes on the ongoing subordination of the national economy to the big imperialist transnationals that are deindustrializing the country to earn more.
In terms of the correlation of forces between the working class and the bosses, this struggle also opens the possibility of reversing the unfavorable conditions that the government of Dina Boluarte and Congress have created from the fierce repression with which they have imposed themselves, along with the retreat of the self-styled “democratic” sectors in the struggle.
And in terms of workers’ organization, it raises the need to overcome the reformist leadership, headed by the CP, which has lulled the workers to sleep and demoralized the fighters of the south and the working class itself.
But in order for the struggle against the layoffs to become a central factor in the class struggle, that effectively confronts all these aspects, it is essential to proceed carefully.
In the first place, it is necessary to call for the broadest unity of action against the layoffs and dismissals, promoting meetings, assemblies and the coordination of the affected sectors, whether they are unionized or not, and call on popular organizations to be part of the same struggle.
In this sense, the leaderships have their own responsibility. Although it sounds contradictory, it is essential to demand that the CGTP, the CUT-Peru, the FETRIMAP and other union federations, which are the concrete leaders of the workers’ organizations at the national level, take the lead and carry out a united action of struggle. This should be a big militant strike, which together with the demand for the end of dismissals and the reinstatement of the fired workers, should add to its demands the needs of the poor.
Wherever possible, and where the facts on the ground demand it, the organized workers should take over the factories to prevent their closure and layoffs. They can put the machines to work under their own control, just as more than 400 companies in Argentina have been doing since the crisis of 2001.
And finally, it is necessary to demand, as a fundamental solution, the nationalization of the companies that lay off their workers or close their plants. This is the only way to guarantee that all the workers keep their jobs. The factories must then go on to function under the control of their workers, of factory committees, which must organize the continuity of production, while the State guarantees the purchase of raw materials, the payment of energy, etc.
We need leadership for this struggle
It will only be on this terrain, that of direct struggle and with mass action by working people in the streets, that we will be able to define the fate of the layoffs.
This demands the independent and political organization of the most militant sectors of the working class to build a leadership that in a consistent, militant, and class-conscious. We need a leadership that is willing take the lead in the fight for the immediate reinstatement of all those fired, the prohibition of permanent and temporary layoffs, and other mechanisms with which the bosses attack the basic right to work.
Only in this way will we put a stop to the wave of layoffs and firings. And we will open, at the same time, the road to the struggle for power and socialism.
This is the task to which the Socialist Workers Party is committed, which without any confidence in the bosses’ legal system, raises the banners of the direct struggle of the working class for their rights and most heartfelt needs.
