Supplement, 20 April 1997

Union Tops Send Dockers Back 

Battle Against Union-Busting in Santos, Brazil

APRIL 20--In the early morning hours of Tuesday, April 15, some 500 heavily armed shock troops of Brazil's Military Police and Federal Police stormed into the port of Santos, near São Paulo, to break a work action by the port workers' unions. Squads of cops climbed aboard launches to invade two ships in the harbor that had been occupied by union dock workers for the last 13 days. The dockers were defending a fundamental gain of the labor movement--the union hiring hall--against the São Paulo Steel Company (Cosipa), which had declared that it would no longer use labor from the hiring hall but would instead hire non-union workers at far lower wages.

The police invasion unleashed a furious reaction from the dock workers. The Intersindical Portuária de Santos (Santos Docks Inter-Union Committee) called a strike of the entire port. Some 2,500 longshoremen, mechanics, clerks and other unionists and their supporters occupied the dock area, sealing it off to incoming and outgoing traffic. More than two dozen ships were anchored in the harbor, unable to unload. When police tried to send in a squad of sharpshooters on top of freight cars, strikers pelted the cops with stones.

What is at stake is the very existence of the unions, under attack by the privatized steel company and the capitalist government. This crackdown has been encouraged by Wall Street, which has praised the Brazilian government's policies of privatization which fueled the elimination of almost 400,000 jobs in the last quarter of 1996. The showdown in Brazil is part of an international pattern of union-busting on the waterfront. It comes after the attack on British longshoremen in Liverpool, where hundreds of workers were thrown out of their jobs and the dock union was pushed out of the port by profit-hungry bosses. Just last week in the port of Rotterdam, the largest in Europe, the shipping bosses likewise moved to eliminate the union shop. The entire Brazilian labor movement and maritime workers throughout the world should come to the aid of their brothers in Santos in their crucial struggle.

In the face of the São Paulo steel company's refusal to drop its plans to hire non-union longshoremen, the dock workers unions declared a 48-hour national strike of Brazil's ports on April 17. In Rio de Janeiro, 4,000 port workers shut down the port completely. Elsewhere there were work stoppages of several hours and demonstrations. Alerted by Liverpool dockers, union supporters internationally sent messages of solidarity to the Santos strikers and demanded that Brazilian president Fernando Henrique Cardoso withdraw the police from the port.

Our fraternal comrades of the Liga Quarta-Internacionalista do Brasil (LQB), based in the steel city of Volta Redonda and in Rio de Janeiro, mobilized quickly to put out a leaflet (printed below) calling for a 48-hour work stoppage by unions nationally in support of the Santos dock workers. Pointing to the treacherous role of the Workers Party (PT) in the oil workers strike in 1995, which was broken when Cardoso sent in the army to occupy the refineries, the LQB emphasized that the key task is to build a revolutionary workers party.

Hundreds of copies of the leaflet were distributed and more than two dozen copies of the LQB's newspaper, Vanguarda Operária (Workers Vanguard), were sold at a April 17 rally in Rio in solidarity with the Landless Rural Workers Movement (MST). The MST was simultaneously holding a national mobilization of thousands in the capital of Brasilia on the first anniversary of the massacre of at least 19 landless peasants by Military Police in the remote settlement of Eldorado dos Carajás in the northern state of Pará. To this date, no judicial action has been taken against the state governor, police commanders or the 155 MPs who took part in this bloody crime. However, on the eve of a meeting with Cardoso, the leader of the MST, José Rainha, sought to negotiate a "truce" in further land occupations. Cardoso responded with arrogant contempt.

The peasant massacre in Eldorado dos Carajás and the cop intervention against the dock workers in Santos underline the importance for the workers movement and fighters for the oppressed to be clear on the role of the police. In 1993, military police assassinated 21 residents of Vigário Geral (Rio de Janeiro). Now, in a Brazilian parallel to the video of California cops beating black motorist Rodney King, São Paulo police were recorded on video torturing and extorting motorists.

As the LQB has emphasized, all types of police along with the military are the armed fist of the bourgeoisie, acting with the courts as the enforcers of the capitalist order against the exploited. The LQB leaflet pointed to the struggle by the Municipal Workers Union in Volta Redonda, who under the leadership of supporters of the LQB voted last July to remove municipal police from the union.

The labor battle under way in Santos to defend the union hiring hall and the very existence of the port workers unions has the potential to mobilize workers throughout Brazil in a sharp struggle against the capitalists and their government. Yet in vain hopes of coming to an understanding with the Cosipa bosses, the head of the stevedores union in Santos, Joaquim Quincas da Silva, ordered the strikers back to work late on Friday, April 18. This capitulation before the pressure of the bourgeoisie is a mortal threat to dock union, and already the company has begun using non-union labor to unload ships backed up in the harbor.

The battle against strikebreaking in Santos, Brazil underlines that the key to defending even the past gains of the workers movement is to oust the pro-capitalist misleaders of labor and to forge a class-struggle leadership, a revolutionary workers party, that can transform the workers' defensive struggles into a generalized offensive against the capitalist system. In waging this struggle, the revolutionary vanguard party must act as a tribune of the people, in defending peasants, impoverished slum dwellers, blacks, women and all the victims of capitalist oppression.

The struggle of the combative dock workers in Santos must become part of a broader struggle for workers revolution, supported by the peasant masses fighting not for an anemic agrarian reform carried out under the guns of the Military Police assassins, but for agrarian revolution undertaken by the peasants themselves, backed up by worker and peasant militias. A successful struggle for a workers and peasants government in Brazil would send shock waves throughout the Americas, and spur a struggle for socialist revolution in the imperialist heartland of the United States. We print below the leaflet by the Liga Quarta-Internacionalista do Brasil on the Santos strike. ___________

Urgent: Solidarity with the Dockers! 17 April 1997

Statement of the Liga Quarta-Internacionalista do Brasil (LQB)

After making a series of threats, on the morning of April 15 [Brazilian president] Cardoso sent the Federal Police to break the strike by the Santos dockers, who are fighting against losing their jobs and the possible destruction of their unions. It was the "new, modern and global" bosses of the Companhia Siderúrgica Paulista (Cosipa--São Paulo Steel Company) who demanded that Cardoso, the servant of the International Monetary Fund and the "new world order," use the force of the bourgeois state against the dockers. This is occurring at the exact moment when the country and the world are sickened by the attacks and murders carried out by the Military Police in the slums of Diadema (state of São Paulo) and Cidade de Deus (state of Rio de Janeiro), which are part of the constant police attacks against workers, the poor, blacks, homosexuals, the oppressed and exploited in general.

The Cospia, São Paulo's largest steel company--which has been privatized like CSN [the National Steel Company in Volta Redonda]--carried out mass firings after privatization, cut wages, cut workers' rights and contracted work out, while at the same time tripling its profits. For its part, CSN fired 10,000 workers while doubling production per man/hour and halving workers' wages and rights. In addition to the constant exploitation of the workers by CSN and Cosipa, in an example of racism these companies treat the occupational disease leukopenia [a blood condition caused by exposure to benzene gas] as a "black disease."

Now, in demanding the use of the strike-breaking police forces, Cosipa wants to stain its hands--already dirty with the corruption and privatization swindles--with the port workers' blood. Once again, Cosipa seeks to imitate what CSN did in 1988 when it demanded intervention by the army, which murdered three workers who were fighting for their rights as part of the steel workers' strike. Now the privatized CSN has bitten off a controlling share of the electrical company and, together with the racist South African Gencor mining firm, has formed a powerful oligopoly to swallow up Vale do Rio Doce, one of the biggest mining concerns in the world [now being privatized].

Wallowing in the "bidders'" mire of corruption, the "social-democrat" Cardoso, in the midst of his "Real Plan for zero inflation," is buying congress with the "extra" raise in representatives' salaries, from 10,600 reals to 21,600 reals per month [the real is approximately equal to a dollar], while Brazil's minimum wage stands frozen at 112 dollars per month, one of the lowest in the world. Cardoso inaugurated his "democratic" government by seeking to destroy the oil workers' unions through the "justice" system and sending the army to break their combative strike in 1995. Today, through his "constitutional reform," he attacks the rights and conquests of the workers, breaking job security and putting an end to retirement plans. After a year of impunity for the military police murderers of the 19 landless peasants in Eldorado dos Carajás, he keeps landless peasants and leftist prisoners in jail--we demand they be freed immediately. He wants to continue with privatizations (give-aways), carrying out the "opening of the ports," which means their privatization/give-away plus unemployment and poverty. This is why Cardoso/Cosipa are using the police to attack the dockers.

Meanwhile it is important to denounce the class collaboration of the PT (Workers Party) and the popular front, and the fiasco of their policy of "openness in the privatizations and non-privatization only of strategic economic sectors" as well as their call on the oil workers to exercise "patience and moderation" during their strike. The popular front pushes each mobilization onto the terrain of mere parliamentarism and electoralism and subordinates the workers movement to the bourgeoisie. Thus we must build a genuine revolutionary workers party which will fight for the real interests of the working class and the oppressed.

In 1996 we undertook a struggle against the affiliation of police to workers unions. A union assembly carried out on 25 July 1996 voted by a wide majority to disaffiliate municipal guards from the SFPMVR (Volta Redonda Municipal Workers Union), since police are not part of the workers movement. We received solidarity from the Liverpool dockers, among others, in an international campaign.

We repudiate the police intervention against the dockers' strike and call for immediate solidarity by the entire workers movement, for a nationwide 48-hour work stoppage by all workers in defense of the dockers!

Cops, "justice" system, bosses and government: Hands off the dockers! Victory to the dockers and immediate freedom for the arrested dockers!

Send correspondence for the LQB to the following address:

Caixa Postal 084027 CEP 27251-970 Volta Redonda - RJ Brazil