For better wages: Postal workers strike shakes half of Brazil
la Izquierda Diario 9 August 2024
Postal workers in 10 states and three major Brazilian cities declared an indefinite strike on Wednesday after 14 failed rounds of negotiations with the federal government demanding better conditions.
The demands of the state-owned company's workers include the opening of a public tender for the hiring of more people and the reduction of the cost of the company's health plan. They are also fighting for a real salary increase, in the face of the refusal of the Government and the company, which only offers a promise of an increase for next year.
Postal workers are a highly exploited sector, often working in harsh conditions, and have suffered from great precariousness in recent years, with the company targeted for privatisation by Michel Temer's coup government (2016-2018) and then even more aggressively under Bolsonaro. As a result, they suffer chronic understaffing, the dismantling of services and the dismantling of their infrastructure. Two years into the Lula-Alckmin Broad Front government, the strike, which also demands better working conditions, exposes how these essential workers continue to suffer from government neglect, which preserves the attacks of its predecessors.
The government's outrageous refusal to raise salaries is in line with what happened with federal education, as well as with agencies such as the Brazilian Institute of the Environment and Social Security, all of which staged heroic strikes in defense of the recomposition of their salaries, clashing strongly with the federal government - including the absurd judicial persecution promoted by the government.
What these strikes are facing is the intransigence of the current government, which seeks to serve financial capital by guaranteeing the payment of the criminal Public Debt through austerity against workers and the continued precariousness of public services. The mechanism through which it does so is the so-called Fiscal Framework , the new spending ceiling that has already been responsible for absurd multimillion-dollar cuts to health and education, guaranteeing money to bankers and speculators and pointing out that the budget is subordinated to their interests. As if that were not enough, they gave an increase of R$ 3.8 billion (about 700 million dollars) to the budget of the judiciary, the same one that imprisoned now-President Lula without evidence. The judicial caste is the only one that gets an increase while the workers remain at zero.
The spending ceiling of the Lula-Alckmin government is a project of misery for the workers. From Esquerda Diario, part of the International Network La Izquierda Diario, we send all our solidarity to the workers of the Brazilian postal service.
https://www.laizquierdadiario.com/Huelga-de-correos-sacude-la-mitad-de-Brasil?
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