A text writen for the FAU (german section of the IWA) newspaper "Direkte Aktion" in September 2008
Situation in Portugal
Like many other countries, Portugal is now going trough an “economic crisis”. The difference is that in Portugal the “crisis” is not new. The model of low wages and bad qualification of workers, maintained for decades as it provided huge profits to the capitalist class, collapsed under the shock of economic globalisation. As a result, in the last years, workers living conditions have deteriorated, the traditional industries (like the textile and shoe making factories) are closing, leaving many unemployed. As elsewhere, the last years saw increasing social inequality and huge concentration of wealth in the hands of few, with huge profits on the financial sector. Precarious and low paid workers became the majority of the working class. Liberal reforms in public health, education and pensions tend to dismantle this social services, leaving place for private profit. Again, nothing new, except that in Portugal this kind of “welfare State” began to be build only 30 years ago.
Portuguese society is caracterized by long periods of absence of visible conflicts. In the last years social unrest has grown, but the workers movement continues to be controlled by the bureaucratic unions. CGTP is the largest union, traditionally influenced by the Communist Party. UGT is the second largest and is controlled by the Socialist Party now in government. The social unrest materialized in some big demonstrations like the 200.000 people march against the meeting of European ministers of work and social affairs a year ago in Lisbon. Also a big teachers movement against education reforms erupted in the last months, leading to a massive 100.000 teachers demonstration in Lisbon, but the bureaucratic and reformist structure of this unions engulfed it.
Many signs of social crisis are appearing, along with massive reinforcement of police forces by the State. More social and work conflicts are arising, and sometimes outside the unions or with little support coming from them. The traditional unions usually only act in the sectors where they are traditionally strong, and mostly try to control the conflicts, denying solidarity between different sectors. Also, there has been an increase of situations of repression and police control over worker's conflicts. But we still don't see much autonomous workers action and solidarity arising.
AIT-SP
AIT-SP (International Workers Association – Portuguese Section) is a small organization which dedicates mostly to solidarity activities and diffusion of anarcho-syndicalist ideas and practices. We aim to enhance and support all kind of class and emancipation struggles and to establish a federation of anarchosyndicalist unions. Right now we have most of our affiliates in the Lisbon area, a small group in Porto, and isolated members across the country.
We publish our journal (Boletim Anarco-Sindicalista) every two months. Its purpose is to spread news of struggles both in Portugal and the world, to publish opinions of our affiliates and basic texts about libertarian workers organization and struggle. We will soon start to publish a magazine with more theoretical, analysis and cultural texts.
This year we made some campaigns against State repression of workers struggles and social movements, and right now we are doing a campaign denouncing the social inequality masked by the “financial crisis”.
We have also been organizing a series of meetings across the country in order to make more people familiar with our organization and its activities and to debate possibilities of workers resistance to exploitation.
We are also having internal debates about defining our identity as anarchosyndicalists and producing a strategy to intervene socially.
Some of our members have been active in support of immigrant workers. In Porto, one of our affiliates will now have a court trial against him for “damaging the good name” of the Foreign Service (SEF), after a demonstration and press conference in June 2006, concerning the case of a Pakistani worker who committed suicide after having his legalization refused.
Our perspectives
We don’t believe we’ll became a huge organization in a few years. Anyway we feel that increasing perspectives of growing as a class struggle organization do exist. There's much to be done about organizing precarious workers who are left outside the existing unions, and about solidarity with immigrants, for instance.
There is no way to link our activities to workers without discussing our own problems as workers (and students) and trying to find ways to act on them, and also making direct contact with other workers, especially workers in struggle, trying to support them. Our members in Porto have some experience in this field, both working in social intervention projects and making links with workers and ecological struggles in northern Portugal.
Recently, we also made contact with the workers of Fidar, a textile factory in the north of the country, where workers have been 24 hour picketing in front of the factory for more than two months, after the boss decided to close the factory and sell it, without paying workers salaries and compensations. In reality, not a very unusual situation in recent years.
We cannot expect workers to join our unions massively, but we can practice class solidarity and mutual aid anyway, gaining struggle experience and enlarging our network of solidarity.
We also feel that increasing international coordination and solidarity is really important now, and we hope that common struggle initiatives like the recent global days of action against Lionbridge Poland, Starbucks and Red Cross International (in solidarity with FORA comrade Federico Puy) are just the beginning of a current dynamic in the IWA. Future campaigns against the 65 hour work week and against anti-immigrant laws in the European Union, for instance, should be the next step.
AIT-SP – September 2008
