Closing speech by
Carlos Carvalhas,
PCP General Secretary PCP’s National Meeting on the action and organization of the Party in
the enterprises and workplaces
Almada, 20th October 2002
A Meeting at the service of the workers, the people and the country
Our National Meeting culminates a set of debates and reflections on the action and the organisation of the Party in the companies and workplaces.
But, above all, this Meeting should be conceived as an impulse for a new beginning to put into practice already defined guidelines and measures and as a great call to attention of the whole party collective to continue to deepen the ways and methods, in order to care for and strengthen the deep roots of the Party within the working class and the workers, from which flows the determining sap of the strength, political nature, revolutionary energy and capacity of intervention of the PCP in Portuguese society.
We have to advance with the measures, to improve our answer and have a better and more rigorous knowledge of the reality we act in.
We also have to continue to evaluate, examine and collect the experiences we have tried and, whenever possible, generalize them, not as a mechanical copy, but in a critical, adjusted form and with realism, taking into account that the situations are very diverse.
The first issue we have to face is the reason why, after defining the guidelines and measures in the Party’s National Conference, in 1994, under the motto “ To renew and strengthen the organisation and the intervention of the Party among the workers”, in the 15th. Congress, in several Central Committee resolutions, we arrived at the 16th. Congress, in spite of the revival and creation of new cells and many advances, with a still reduced level of party organisation in the enterprises and workplaces.
What are the objective and subjective reasons? How to overcome the difficulties? How to put into practice just guidelines in a situation of greater repression and anti-communist discrimination, in a situation of increasing democratic limitations within the companies, greater precariousness of jobs and greater pulverization of enterprises?
How do we, there in the workplaces, stimulate recruitment?
How do we make the forms of organisation, meeting and intervention more effective and attractive?
What imaginative and flexible forms do we find to answer the forms of behaviour and living of the new generations of workers?
How do we break routines, readymade answers, beforehand defeatisms, but also sterile voluntarisms?
How do we materialize measures in leadership and cadres to pursue this work?
These were some of the issues present in the preparation and debate of this Meeting. It is necessary to proceed, and proceed in the organisation, taking into account the obstacles, objectives and the different regional realities, the political and class conscience of the workers’ collectives, the attempts to place divisions between the older and the younger generations, the immigrants and the nationals, the precarious with those with permanent contracts, the employed and the unemployed.
We do not wish an organisation for organisation’s sake, but an organisation to intervene, to better defend the workers and the people.
It is true that there were mutations and great social mutations, but they did not remove exploitation.
The situation we today face in the country and the world makes it all the more necessary to have intervenient, dynamic and influential communist parties, linked to the workers and the masses.
This National Meeting was not, naturally, conceived as an accomplished and closed reflection, nor had the pretension of finding definitive guidelines and solutions, with assured success, to significantly widen the presence and intervention of our Party in the workplaces. But our Meeting is a firm and engaged step towards achieving the objectives we aim at. We want to reinforce this presence to improve and intensify our struggle in defence of the interests of the working men and women, to reinforce their unitary organisations, to affirm their role in national life, to further solidify the bond of the Party with the workers as an essential element of its history, identity, struggle and project
A reinforcement that is also fundamental to defeat the offensive of the right and build an alternative of justice and progress.
And when we speak of the reinforcement of the Party we have to bear in mind its dialectic interconnection with political initiative, with decentralization, with permanent attention to recruitment, namely of youth and women, organisation and responsibility, as well as, interconnection and mutual dynamization and potentiation between the masses and institutional work.
This National Meeting is another significant expression of a generous collective which wishes to proceed, which does not stand still, knows the strength of its convictions and the justness of its struggle. Of a Party which does not have difficulty in critically acknowledging its insufficiencies and deficiencies and distances itself from attitudes of self-satisfaction, bragging and verbalism which lead to passiveness, routine and a merely tribunicial intervention. A National Meeting of a Party which does not fear criticisms, but rather sees them as a stimulus for reflection and improvement of its intervention, of a Party which “continues faithful to the just idea of the irreplaceable role of its militants”, in the debate, reflection, intervention and definition of its great guidelines.
A reactionary offensive
This initiative of ours also takes place in a situation of a great offensive of the right, but also of a great political initiative of the Party and movements, protests and struggle of social forces.
The Public Administration strike and its magnificent march, which we greet from this rostrum, have an important significance in the present conjuncture, concerning the scope and depth of the indignation and discontent and concerning the will to combat a policy of retrocession at the service of great interests.
The Prime Minister, in a posture of a “celestial angel” who only missed wings, in a pious and moving voice, said he understood the protest of the Public Administration workers, but was left without a choice.
He wants us to believe that the Government has no other option in view of the Stability Pact and the budgetary difficulties.
It is false. What the Government wants is for the workers, as always, to pay the bill of the policies of concentration of wealth, of neo-liberal and clientele policies, of policies at the service of financial, speculative and parasitic policies.
The options of the government are clear. It wants to impose a regression on the retirement schemes, decrease the real wages of the Public Administration workers and use this increase as a type of wage ceiling in the private sector negotiations.
It wants to increase the tax burden on the employees by updating the income tax brackets below the inflation rate. And it preserves the VAT increase, an unfair tax that collects 19% from the multimillionaire as well as from the minimum national wage earners.
At the same time, it opts to exempt from taxation the profits (IRC) and the gains made by Social Participation Management Funds and creates a regime of 20% deduction on the paid part of IRC, called “fiscal reserve for investment” which, under the proposed terms, will mainly mean an increase in the net profits of the export companies. It also exempts from IRC the pension funds to make it more attractive to transfer the more profitable parts of Social Security to the funds managed by private insurance companies and the banks, the social participation management funds.
Not content with this, it increases the tax benefits on financial activities and, contrary to affirmations by the Prime Minister, the value of benefits to the Madeira off shore amounts to 600 million euros!
As you see, the options of the Government have a clear direction: tighten the belt of those who work and loosen that of those who have always been benefited and privileged.
Even some marketing operations to disguise the direction of this policy, are what they are.
Some of you will remember the Government’s announcement, with great solemnity and headlines, that it would reduce and limit some of the perks of public managerial cadres, even announcing that Cabinet had approved a decree on this matter.
It was a shameless staging. The decree was approved in general and never saw the light of the day. It never returned to Cabinet, nor was ever submitted for appreciation by workers’ organisations: everything is as it was, but the act was played.
There were and are other options if the Government did not behave like the managing board of the banking interests, private insurance companies, the great economic groups and the multinationals.
It is not only the workers who will be penalized. It will also happen to the micro and small companies through the wrong and unfair options of the Government, through the fiscal policy, the decrease of the buying power of the popular masses, the reduction of the purchasing power of the local governments and the delays in payments (many municipalities are the main acquirers of goods and services) and even by the huge superstores, whose unequal competition will tend to grow. And this policy will have serious negative consequences on this entrepreneurial area.
The words of the Prime Minister who pharisaically says that the Government has no other options, are even more shocking when we look at the “shady transaction” made with Alberto João Jardim (President of the Regional Government of Madeira), in order to buy his silence for one year in contrast, for example, with his attitude towards the Azores …
The government’s posture of submission to the Stability Pact is also unacceptable. Its deflationary policy, of reducing public investment in opposition to what was necessary when the horizon looms with recession factors, is a disastrous policy.
We accuse the Government of, through its policy and this Budget, leading the country towards stagnation and recession with all the negative effects on the productive tissue and the social tissue.
And this when the French Commissioner Pascal Lamy came forward, three days ago, saying that the Stability Pact is a “coarse instrument of economic management”, calling the 3% budget deficit limit “ a medieval rule”. And when the president of the European Commission himself, Romano Prodi, recognizes that “the Stability Pact is stupid”, like all decisions that are rigid, adding that you cannot have a flourishing, strong, growing Europe, without being able to adjust their decisions according to the moments.
And this Government instead of exerting pressure for its renegotiation, shuts its mouth to the arrogant ear boxing of Spanish commissioner Pedro Solbes. Instead of telling him to talk to his French peer or to Prodi, the Government ends up by submitting to a “coarse instrument”, a “medieval rule” and a “stupid Pact”.
This very week German Chancellor Gerhard Schroder said that it is necessary to have a flexible view of the Stability Pact, enabling to link the deficit reduction to growth.
And the number grows of those who propose not including investment expenditure in accounting the deficit or those who advocate its global renegotiation.
Its irrationality is now so clear that even the defenders of financial orthodoxy and those who held it as a dogma were forced to accept the slide of the zero deficit goal from 2004 to 2006.
We welcome PS’s change of stand in relation to this matter, but we have to bear in mind that it was PS, together with PSD, who approved it, nor the accusations thrown, during the past years, against our criticisms and even proposals, when we defended, that at the very least, Portugal should have demanded the postponement of the zero deficit goal!
It is necessary to tear with the Stability Pact and the present ECB guideline and establish negotiations for a budgetary and monetary policy to give a thrust to development, employment and professional education. A Pact of Solidarity and cooperation that favours, in concrete, the “social and economic cohesion” and favours the real convergence of the economies.
With submission to the Stability Pact, with a contracting policy, we are heading for the abyss.
How far removed we are from triumphalism of those who affirmed that we were among the “frontrunners”, of those who sold the “new economy” as a saving board of our sustained development, of those who spoke so much about “Portugal’s modernity” and that “Portugal was in fashion”.
Suddenly, those who said we had to grow faster than the European average and the vendors of illusion forgot “ the front runners”, the “new economy” and are quiet. They do not have the consolation of Greece in the last place …
The answer to the Budget problems cannot be that of the blind cuts in public spending or the obsession of gathering revenue in any way; nor the privatisation of the State holdings in basic strategic companies, which run the risk of falling into foreign hands and foreign centres of decision.
In the framework of the European Union and “globalisation” and a high rate of foreign indebtedness of Portuguese companies, the seizure of important and decisive actives by the creditors or by “stand-ins” will tend to be stronger and will deepen with the privatising fury. And we shall have the State’s social functions and public services which under private hold, will be decapitalized and degraded, as was the case in other countries, an example of which is the Railway System in England. Also the sale in public auction, without criteria, of public buildings, as is the case of the Science Faculty in Oporto, are other ridiculous and wrong options that the workers, the people and the country will pay dearly. And when talking about the deficit and painting the situation in dark colours, we do not see decisive and clear steps in the combat against fraud and great tax evasion. We continue to be a haven for tax evasion and money laundering.
But the options of the Government at the service of the great interests are also very clear, namely in the Labour Code Project and in the changes to the Basic laws on Social Security. Either the government wants to convince the workers that it is in their interest that it wishes to give more reasons and ease to the companies to dismiss reducing the limit of unjustified absenteeism, going as far as placing under the sphere of dismissal with a justified reason a man or woman worker who comes late for work once per month, or that, in imitation of Mr. Berlusconi’s legislation, the company is granted the right of not accepting back an unjustly dismissed worker after the conclusion of the case.
Does the Prime Minister wish to convince the workers that it is with their rights in mind that he wants to transform, for example, the employing agent into his own judge in the management and organisation of the work time where, based on an average work schedule, he could demand a 10-hour day and a 50-hour week paid singly? Or is with their living standard and future in mind that the Government wants to extend from 20.00 hours to 23.00 hours the beginning of the night shift, establish almost absolute polyvalence, extend to 20 years the term contracts, change the concept of pay and so on …
Out of thousands of devilries and thousands of examples we could present, we give just a small example to get the idea of what the Labour Code means concretely.
Based upon the labour contract at the CUF Hospital, a worker who presently works eight days a month in a night shift and another four days during the day on a week-end, which is common among the healthcare employees, he would cease to earn, with the legislation proposed by the government around 40.000 escudos (200 euros) per month. He would also lose this sum on his 13th and 14th month pay, would lose around 780.000 escudos per year.
This is just an example, but which makes it clear what the “carta di lavoro” of Minister Bagão Felix means.
But the custom of class, backward and reactionary, goes to the point of wanting to invade the women and men workers’ privacy, particularly during admission and, namely in relation to pregnancy.
This is not surprising from a Government and particularly a Minister for Labour, who has taken the most reactionary positions in relation to women and their rights, the voluntary interruption of pregnancy, the concept of family and in relation to sexual education in schools.
The State secretary for Education, speaking frankly, said in the Assembly of the Republic that the teachers had no ethics to give sexual education classes in the schools! Confronted by the communist members of parliament, embarrassed, she excused herself by saying that she had no parliamentary experience, an excuse whispered to her by the Minister for Parliamentary Affairs.
That means: if she had parliamentary experience she would continue to think so and have the same practice, but would not say it loud in the Assembly of the Republic. In other words: if she had more experience, she would act with more cynicism.
Also in Social Security the Government’s options leave no doubt as to whom they serve. By imposing that the contributions of those workers who might come under the scope of contributive ceilings be transformed into sources of incalculable profits to the bankers and owners of private insurance companies, the Government knows whom it is serving and, by imposing them to subject and assume all the risks of their pensions, what it aims is for future generations of workers to exchange their certain and guaranteed pensions by the public system, for uncertain pensions at the mercy of the stock exchange roulette.
To garner the support of the retired it says that the more debased pensions will come closer to the minimum wage, a pledge which is already, and in a better way, included in the present Basic law. What the government intends is to provoke a rupture in the principle of solidarity and hand the great deductions to the private insurance companies.
The government persists on the attack on wages, retirements, employment ties of the Public Administration workers and, arrogantly, affirms its determination to go ahead with the labour law package, with the privatisation of the more profitable parts of Social Security, the debasement of public schooling, the privatisation of the National Health Service.
This offensive and this arrogance have been answered with the struggle of the workers and they will continue to answer with the struggle. The workers called together by CGTP-IN for the 30th. October action, in a great initiative of struggle, which will not be the highest struggle, the maximum or the last struggle, but may show the workers’ inclination for the fight, protest and indignation compelling the government towards the first significant retreats.
What makes this Government run are not the interests of the workers, the new generations of workers or the retired.
What makes this Government run is the satisfaction of the great interests it represents and interprets.
Could the Mello group have a better Minister for Health than the present one, who wants to hand over the new hospitals to private management, as well as the more desirable services in the remaining ones …and even privatise the tie of public employment of its workers?
Could CIP (Employers’ Confederation) and the private insurance companies have a better minister than the present one, who came from their ranks and assumes their main claims?
Could the lobbies of US military-industrial complex have a better Minister of Defence, to recover lost ground, than the present “Modern” minister? [Note: It seems that the Minister of Defence had some shady dealings with the Modern University].
And could the present Minister of Defence have a better Minister of Justice, than the present one, to disentangle him from the cumbersome situation and throw smoke screens to disguise his problems from public opinion?
The past times have been fertile in manoeuvres of diversion and “foolishnesses” to hide the responsibilities of the true problems of the country and namely the ethical issues involving the Minister of Defence.
The recent case of the Chief of Staff of the Armed Forces and its magnification by the government and the Minister of Defence is also situated in this attempt to create new smoke screens to hide the Modern University case, the villainies of the labour law package and the real problems of Portuguese society.
Who, like the Minister of Defence, created high expectations in relation to the equipment, careers and visibility of the Armed Forces, who, with demagoguery, promised so much to the veterans and the pensioners, cannot be surprised by the uneasiness, protests and indignation of those who now feel cheated. The pressure and demand that the Minister of Defence, with a loss of authority, is exerting for the resignation of the Chief of Staff, does not represent on the part of government a gain of authority, seriousness or strength, but of weakness, manoeuverism, degradation and lack of straightforwardness. On the eve of the Prime Minister’s call on the President of the Republic, the Government, meaning to pressure the Presidency, anonymously released to the media the news that the Government was thinking about dismissing the Armed Forces Chief of Staff. This is an unacceptable attitude in the relationship of the Government and the Prime Minister with the President of the Republic. But that was not the end of the issue. The Prime Minister’s meeting with the President of the Republic was inconclusive. A new meeting was set for tomorrow. The Prime Minister retreated, undramatized and even wished the journalists a happy weekend. In the middle of the afternoon, the Minister of Defence, through an anonymous source from his office, tells the media that he had lost political confidence in the AMCS. What is this but an intolerable pressure on the President of the Republic? What is this but attempting to make the President of the Republic a mere executor of the dismissal of the Armed Forces Chief of Staff? Besides the lack of respect for the President and the Armed Forces, these attitudes are a demonstration of arrogance, lack of a sense of state, which debase the institutions, institutional relationship and democracy. They are an affront to the President of the Republic and to democratic life.
The Minister of Defence is a factor of instability, democratic discredit, and once again showed that he is not, or has any conditions, to continue as a minister. His dismissal, without any qualms, is a democratic claim and an act of dignifying the institutions.
The country sorely needs a different policy and sorely needs to defeat the anti-social and backward policy of the Government and not diversionary manoeuvres, party quibbles, bellow the belt politics.
The unemployed citizen, the teacher who finds no work, the youth whom is only offered a job without rights and low wages, the families who see their budget dried up before the end of the month by the successive increase in prices, that the official numbers conceal, cannot understand this shouting, these politicking and cannot understand the lack of debate and solutions to the problems.
This shouting to divert attention from the real problems is yet another contribution for the debasement of the institutions and discredit of politics.
The unfulfilling of promises, doing the opposite of the promises, doing things never said during the electoral campaign to garner votes and coming to power like did PSD, leads the citizens to loss of trust, abstention and even disinterest.
It is also unacceptable to try to band all parties under the same label, trying to convey the idea that all parties are equal. Recently you could read in a well-known paper an article with the following headline “all parties were financed by the Modern University”. Then, in the unfolding of the article, “all” referred to PSD, CDS/PP, and PS … We do not accept this amalgamation. The difference has to be shown and PCP has to mark a difference in the exercise of power, to mark a difference in a serious and responsible survey of the problems, to mark a difference in the search of solutions and proposals, to mark a difference in fulfilment of promises.
And I believe that in all these aspects the balance is in our favour.
Those who wish to look at reality without prejudice, cannot fail to recognize that the PCP, in the application of the guidelines and decisions of its 22nd. June National Conference, is carrying out a very intense, qualified and diversified activity on the most heartfelt problems of the workers and large strata of the population and which make the PCP, undoubtedly, the political force most actively engaged in the field of the action, struggle, explanation, combat against the Government policy.
Knowing what these added efforts represent and knowing how much it means in terms of generosity and spirit of sacrifice of the communist militants, we want to continue to be so: in the front line of explanation, the front line of the struggle and presentation of alternative proposals to the policy of the right.
And that is why, after the great action on the Labour Package and Social Security we have just carried out, from here we announce that the Party proposes, during the month of November, a great action of explanation, with a aim of contacting one million Portuguese and that, continuing the denouncement of the Labour Package, will be mainly centred on the cost of living, wages and taxes and Government’s disastrous policies on these matters.
Let us stop the war before it begins!
Our National Meeting is also taking place in an international situation in which the US tries its best to bomb and invade Iraq.
And they no longer conceal that it is their objective to directly and militarily govern the country after the ouster of Saddam Hussein.
But what they still conceal is that their main objective is far from being a struggle against terrorism. Their main objective is the control over Iraqi oil and the control of this region of the world.
On15th. September, the “Washington Post” said that “ in a war against Iraq, oil is the key word” And with some frankness in a “Wall Street Journal “ interview, Bush adviser, Larry Lindsey, said that “changing the Iraqi regime means being able to raise the world production of oil by 3 to 5 million barrels” and candidly continued “ if the war goes well, this will be good for the economy”.
The American oil companies, driven away from Iraq after 1983, also do not hide their impatience that has been going for long. The president of the “Chevron” oil company, in a S. Francisco club, unlocked his soul saying: “Iraq has huge reserves of oil and gas, to which we would love to accede”. What more is there to say? We are in the presence of an American artist ...
In this game of shadows and cynicism played with the rhetoric of human rights, the real reasons of the Bush administration’s great tenacity are beginning to get clearer.
And even resort to blackmail to win support for military action.
CIA director, James Woolsey, has unabashedly said that after the change of regime in Iraq, the non-American companies who have supported Saddam would be excluded from the Iraqi oil. You cannot be clearer.
Public opinion in the several countries where important demonstrations were held, has been gaining conscience of Washington’s real plans and objectives. Also in Portugal this gaining of conscience is important in terms of the war itself, as well as because we have a government ready for all subservience and vassalage. Always ready to compromise the country, the Lages Base and the Armed Forces to the whole designs of US imperialism.
That is why from here we welcome all the explanation actions that were held and the protest actions already marked and namely JCP’s [Youth Communist Organization] initiative in front of the UN office, in Lisbon, next Tuesday.
The intolerable carnage in Bali was immediately seized by Bush who, shamelessly, saw in it new reasons to invade Iraq without further delay.
We affirm that it is necessary to fight terrorism and that we condemn it very clearly, in the past as in the present. And we would like to remind that it was the US and not the progress and peace loving forces who, in the past, financed, armed and organised the “Bin Ladens and Saddam Husseins” of the world.
We do not accept the instrumentalisation of the shocking tragedy of the American people on September 11, to transform the international relations in a crusade of “good” against “Evil”, in the law of the “Far West”, of the “Dead or Alive”; in the civilization clash between West and East; in the world domination by US imperialism.
Bush’s declarations and stands and his rush to place American “nail boots” in that strategic region, clearly show that which is at stake is not US security, neither world security, nor the suffering of the Palestinian people, nor what Sharon´s criminal policy does to the Israeli and Palestinian people.
To Bush and puppet Tony Blair, only the smell of oil matters.
When Saddam Hussein was strong, when American companies were in Iraq and he persecuted his opponents, the Kurds and the communists, Saddam was not dangerous, was a “saintly” defender of human rights. Today, with Iraq destroyed and isolated, but without the presence of American companies, Saddam is already a dangerous threat to the US ...
This is a policy of double standards. From here we salute the peace fighters, we greet the Palestinian people and the Palestinian Authority, whom recently a delegation of our Party directly expressed our full solidarity, and we also salute the forces of peace in Israel, who fight against Sharon´s Zionist and terrorist policy.
We shall continue to loudly utter “Yes to peace, no to war” and demand from the Portuguese Government a policy of peace, a stand which rejects subservience and vassalage, a patriotic and contributing policy for the resolution of the conflicts by political and diplomatic means. As our Party and JCP proclaim: “Let us stop the war, before it begins”...
Yes, a stronger PCP is possible and necessary
In the present international and national situation, the strengthening of the PCP and the strengthening of its organisation and influence in the workplaces and Portuguese society, has a decisive importance.
Our action with the workers is very important to defeat and reverse this policy and the combats of today and tomorrow.
We reaffirm: the workers and the people need a party like the PCP, a party of causes and values, a party which receives from the workers and the people the inspiration, creativity and energy for its revolutionary combat but, at the same time and because of this, is a force the Portuguese men and women, who aspire for a fairer and more fraternal society, the Portuguese men and women, the youth, all those who have lost the capacity for revolt against the political and social quagmire in which the government of the right wants to pull Portugal, the Portuguese men and women who aspire for a different policy and a different behaviour in politics, can trust.
The workers, the people and the country need this Party, its initiative, intervention, struggle, a Party which does not submit nor surrender, a Party which without self-satisfaction or bragging, tries to answer to the problems, presents proposals and alternatives and fights for their application; a Party of men, women and youth for whom generosity, dedication, militancy, energy and engagement centre on the struggle for social justice, deepening of democracy, a Portugal of progress, in an Europe of peace and cooperation, for socialism.
Categorias
Entidades
Closing speech by
Carlos Carvalhas,
PCP General Secretary PCP’s National Meeting on the action and organization of the Party in
the enterprises and workplaces
Almada, 20th October 2002
A Meeting at the service of the workers, the people and the country
Our National Meeting culminates a set of debates and reflections on the action and the organisation of the Party in the companies and workplaces.
But, above all, this Meeting should be conceived as an impulse for a new beginning to put into practice already defined guidelines and measures and as a great call to attention of the whole party collective to continue to deepen the ways and methods, in order to care for and strengthen the deep roots of the Party within the working class and the workers, from which flows the determining sap of the strength, political nature, revolutionary energy and capacity of intervention of the PCP in Portuguese society.
We have to advance with the measures, to improve our answer and have a better and more rigorous knowledge of the reality we act in.
We also have to continue to evaluate, examine and collect the experiences we have tried and, whenever possible, generalize them, not as a mechanical copy, but in a critical, adjusted form and with realism, taking into account that the situations are very diverse.
The first issue we have to face is the reason why, after defining the guidelines and measures in the Party’s National Conference, in 1994, under the motto “ To renew and strengthen the organisation and the intervention of the Party among the workers”, in the 15th. Congress, in several Central Committee resolutions, we arrived at the 16th. Congress, in spite of the revival and creation of new cells and many advances, with a still reduced level of party organisation in the enterprises and workplaces.
What are the objective and subjective reasons? How to overcome the difficulties? How to put into practice just guidelines in a situation of greater repression and anti-communist discrimination, in a situation of increasing democratic limitations within the companies, greater precariousness of jobs and greater pulverization of enterprises?
How do we, there in the workplaces, stimulate recruitment?
How do we make the forms of organisation, meeting and intervention more effective and attractive?
What imaginative and flexible forms do we find to answer the forms of behaviour and living of the new generations of workers?
How do we break routines, readymade answers, beforehand defeatisms, but also sterile voluntarisms?
How do we materialize measures in leadership and cadres to pursue this work?
These were some of the issues present in the preparation and debate of this Meeting. It is necessary to proceed, and proceed in the organisation, taking into account the obstacles, objectives and the different regional realities, the political and class conscience of the workers’ collectives, the attempts to place divisions between the older and the younger generations, the immigrants and the nationals, the precarious with those with permanent contracts, the employed and the unemployed.
We do not wish an organisation for organisation’s sake, but an organisation to intervene, to better defend the workers and the people.
It is true that there were mutations and great social mutations, but they did not remove exploitation.
The situation we today face in the country and the world makes it all the more necessary to have intervenient, dynamic and influential communist parties, linked to the workers and the masses.
This National Meeting was not, naturally, conceived as an accomplished and closed reflection, nor had the pretension of finding definitive guidelines and solutions, with assured success, to significantly widen the presence and intervention of our Party in the workplaces. But our Meeting is a firm and engaged step towards achieving the objectives we aim at. We want to reinforce this presence to improve and intensify our struggle in defence of the interests of the working men and women, to reinforce their unitary organisations, to affirm their role in national life, to further solidify the bond of the Party with the workers as an essential element of its history, identity, struggle and project
A reinforcement that is also fundamental to defeat the offensive of the right and build an alternative of justice and progress.
And when we speak of the reinforcement of the Party we have to bear in mind its dialectic interconnection with political initiative, with decentralization, with permanent attention to recruitment, namely of youth and women, organisation and responsibility, as well as, interconnection and mutual dynamization and potentiation between the masses and institutional work.
This National Meeting is another significant expression of a generous collective which wishes to proceed, which does not stand still, knows the strength of its convictions and the justness of its struggle. Of a Party which does not have difficulty in critically acknowledging its insufficiencies and deficiencies and distances itself from attitudes of self-satisfaction, bragging and verbalism which lead to passiveness, routine and a merely tribunicial intervention. A National Meeting of a Party which does not fear criticisms, but rather sees them as a stimulus for reflection and improvement of its intervention, of a Party which “continues faithful to the just idea of the irreplaceable role of its militants”, in the debate, reflection, intervention and definition of its great guidelines.
A reactionary offensive
This initiative of ours also takes place in a situation of a great offensive of the right, but also of a great political initiative of the Party and movements, protests and struggle of social forces.
The Public Administration strike and its magnificent march, which we greet from this rostrum, have an important significance in the present conjuncture, concerning the scope and depth of the indignation and discontent and concerning the will to combat a policy of retrocession at the service of great interests.
The Prime Minister, in a posture of a “celestial angel” who only missed wings, in a pious and moving voice, said he understood the protest of the Public Administration workers, but was left without a choice.
He wants us to believe that the Government has no other option in view of the Stability Pact and the budgetary difficulties.
It is false. What the Government wants is for the workers, as always, to pay the bill of the policies of concentration of wealth, of neo-liberal and clientele policies, of policies at the service of financial, speculative and parasitic policies.
The options of the government are clear. It wants to impose a regression on the retirement schemes, decrease the real wages of the Public Administration workers and use this increase as a type of wage ceiling in the private sector negotiations.
It wants to increase the tax burden on the employees by updating the income tax brackets below the inflation rate. And it preserves the VAT increase, an unfair tax that collects 19% from the multimillionaire as well as from the minimum national wage earners.
At the same time, it opts to exempt from taxation the profits (IRC) and the gains made by Social Participation Management Funds and creates a regime of 20% deduction on the paid part of IRC, called “fiscal reserve for investment” which, under the proposed terms, will mainly mean an increase in the net profits of the export companies. It also exempts from IRC the pension funds to make it more attractive to transfer the more profitable parts of Social Security to the funds managed by private insurance companies and the banks, the social participation management funds.
Not content with this, it increases the tax benefits on financial activities and, contrary to affirmations by the Prime Minister, the value of benefits to the Madeira off shore amounts to 600 million euros!
As you see, the options of the Government have a clear direction: tighten the belt of those who work and loosen that of those who have always been benefited and privileged.
Even some marketing operations to disguise the direction of this policy, are what they are.
Some of you will remember the Government’s announcement, with great solemnity and headlines, that it would reduce and limit some of the perks of public managerial cadres, even announcing that Cabinet had approved a decree on this matter.
It was a shameless staging. The decree was approved in general and never saw the light of the day. It never returned to Cabinet, nor was ever submitted for appreciation by workers’ organisations: everything is as it was, but the act was played.
There were and are other options if the Government did not behave like the managing board of the banking interests, private insurance companies, the great economic groups and the multinationals.
It is not only the workers who will be penalized. It will also happen to the micro and small companies through the wrong and unfair options of the Government, through the fiscal policy, the decrease of the buying power of the popular masses, the reduction of the purchasing power of the local governments and the delays in payments (many municipalities are the main acquirers of goods and services) and even by the huge superstores, whose unequal competition will tend to grow. And this policy will have serious negative consequences on this entrepreneurial area.
The words of the Prime Minister who pharisaically says that the Government has no other options, are even more shocking when we look at the “shady transaction” made with Alberto João Jardim (President of the Regional Government of Madeira), in order to buy his silence for one year in contrast, for example, with his attitude towards the Azores …
The government’s posture of submission to the Stability Pact is also unacceptable. Its deflationary policy, of reducing public investment in opposition to what was necessary when the horizon looms with recession factors, is a disastrous policy.
We accuse the Government of, through its policy and this Budget, leading the country towards stagnation and recession with all the negative effects on the productive tissue and the social tissue.
And this when the French Commissioner Pascal Lamy came forward, three days ago, saying that the Stability Pact is a “coarse instrument of economic management”, calling the 3% budget deficit limit “ a medieval rule”. And when the president of the European Commission himself, Romano Prodi, recognizes that “the Stability Pact is stupid”, like all decisions that are rigid, adding that you cannot have a flourishing, strong, growing Europe, without being able to adjust their decisions according to the moments.
And this Government instead of exerting pressure for its renegotiation, shuts its mouth to the arrogant ear boxing of Spanish commissioner Pedro Solbes. Instead of telling him to talk to his French peer or to Prodi, the Government ends up by submitting to a “coarse instrument”, a “medieval rule” and a “stupid Pact”.
This very week German Chancellor Gerhard Schroder said that it is necessary to have a flexible view of the Stability Pact, enabling to link the deficit reduction to growth.
And the number grows of those who propose not including investment expenditure in accounting the deficit or those who advocate its global renegotiation.
Its irrationality is now so clear that even the defenders of financial orthodoxy and those who held it as a dogma were forced to accept the slide of the zero deficit goal from 2004 to 2006.
We welcome PS’s change of stand in relation to this matter, but we have to bear in mind that it was PS, together with PSD, who approved it, nor the accusations thrown, during the past years, against our criticisms and even proposals, when we defended, that at the very least, Portugal should have demanded the postponement of the zero deficit goal!
It is necessary to tear with the Stability Pact and the present ECB guideline and establish negotiations for a budgetary and monetary policy to give a thrust to development, employment and professional education. A Pact of Solidarity and cooperation that favours, in concrete, the “social and economic cohesion” and favours the real convergence of the economies.
With submission to the Stability Pact, with a contracting policy, we are heading for the abyss.
How far removed we are from triumphalism of those who affirmed that we were among the “frontrunners”, of those who sold the “new economy” as a saving board of our sustained development, of those who spoke so much about “Portugal’s modernity” and that “Portugal was in fashion”.
Suddenly, those who said we had to grow faster than the European average and the vendors of illusion forgot “ the front runners”, the “new economy” and are quiet. They do not have the consolation of Greece in the last place …
The answer to the Budget problems cannot be that of the blind cuts in public spending or the obsession of gathering revenue in any way; nor the privatisation of the State holdings in basic strategic companies, which run the risk of falling into foreign hands and foreign centres of decision.
In the framework of the European Union and “globalisation” and a high rate of foreign indebtedness of Portuguese companies, the seizure of important and decisive actives by the creditors or by “stand-ins” will tend to be stronger and will deepen with the privatising fury. And we shall have the State’s social functions and public services which under private hold, will be decapitalized and degraded, as was the case in other countries, an example of which is the Railway System in England. Also the sale in public auction, without criteria, of public buildings, as is the case of the Science Faculty in Oporto, are other ridiculous and wrong options that the workers, the people and the country will pay dearly. And when talking about the deficit and painting the situation in dark colours, we do not see decisive and clear steps in the combat against fraud and great tax evasion. We continue to be a haven for tax evasion and money laundering.
But the options of the Government at the service of the great interests are also very clear, namely in the Labour Code Project and in the changes to the Basic laws on Social Security. Either the government wants to convince the workers that it is in their interest that it wishes to give more reasons and ease to the companies to dismiss reducing the limit of unjustified absenteeism, going as far as placing under the sphere of dismissal with a justified reason a man or woman worker who comes late for work once per month, or that, in imitation of Mr. Berlusconi’s legislation, the company is granted the right of not accepting back an unjustly dismissed worker after the conclusion of the case.
Does the Prime Minister wish to convince the workers that it is with their rights in mind that he wants to transform, for example, the employing agent into his own judge in the management and organisation of the work time where, based on an average work schedule, he could demand a 10-hour day and a 50-hour week paid singly? Or is with their living standard and future in mind that the Government wants to extend from 20.00 hours to 23.00 hours the beginning of the night shift, establish almost absolute polyvalence, extend to 20 years the term contracts, change the concept of pay and so on …
Out of thousands of devilries and thousands of examples we could present, we give just a small example to get the idea of what the Labour Code means concretely.
Based upon the labour contract at the CUF Hospital, a worker who presently works eight days a month in a night shift and another four days during the day on a week-end, which is common among the healthcare employees, he would cease to earn, with the legislation proposed by the government around 40.000 escudos (200 euros) per month. He would also lose this sum on his 13th and 14th month pay, would lose around 780.000 escudos per year.
This is just an example, but which makes it clear what the “carta di lavoro” of Minister Bagão Felix means.
But the custom of class, backward and reactionary, goes to the point of wanting to invade the women and men workers’ privacy, particularly during admission and, namely in relation to pregnancy.
This is not surprising from a Government and particularly a Minister for Labour, who has taken the most reactionary positions in relation to women and their rights, the voluntary interruption of pregnancy, the concept of family and in relation to sexual education in schools.
The State secretary for Education, speaking frankly, said in the Assembly of the Republic that the teachers had no ethics to give sexual education classes in the schools! Confronted by the communist members of parliament, embarrassed, she excused herself by saying that she had no parliamentary experience, an excuse whispered to her by the Minister for Parliamentary Affairs.
That means: if she had parliamentary experience she would continue to think so and have the same practice, but would not say it loud in the Assembly of the Republic. In other words: if she had more experience, she would act with more cynicism.
Also in Social Security the Government’s options leave no doubt as to whom they serve. By imposing that the contributions of those workers who might come under the scope of contributive ceilings be transformed into sources of incalculable profits to the bankers and owners of private insurance companies, the Government knows whom it is serving and, by imposing them to subject and assume all the risks of their pensions, what it aims is for future generations of workers to exchange their certain and guaranteed pensions by the public system, for uncertain pensions at the mercy of the stock exchange roulette.
To garner the support of the retired it says that the more debased pensions will come closer to the minimum wage, a pledge which is already, and in a better way, included in the present Basic law. What the government intends is to provoke a rupture in the principle of solidarity and hand the great deductions to the private insurance companies.
The government persists on the attack on wages, retirements, employment ties of the Public Administration workers and, arrogantly, affirms its determination to go ahead with the labour law package, with the privatisation of the more profitable parts of Social Security, the debasement of public schooling, the privatisation of the National Health Service.
This offensive and this arrogance have been answered with the struggle of the workers and they will continue to answer with the struggle. The workers called together by CGTP-IN for the 30th. October action, in a great initiative of struggle, which will not be the highest struggle, the maximum or the last struggle, but may show the workers’ inclination for the fight, protest and indignation compelling the government towards the first significant retreats.
What makes this Government run are not the interests of the workers, the new generations of workers or the retired.
What makes this Government run is the satisfaction of the great interests it represents and interprets.
Could the Mello group have a better Minister for Health than the present one, who wants to hand over the new hospitals to private management, as well as the more desirable services in the remaining ones …and even privatise the tie of public employment of its workers?
Could CIP (Employers’ Confederation) and the private insurance companies have a better minister than the present one, who came from their ranks and assumes their main claims?
Could the lobbies of US military-industrial complex have a better Minister of Defence, to recover lost ground, than the present “Modern” minister? [Note: It seems that the Minister of Defence had some shady dealings with the Modern University].
And could the present Minister of Defence have a better Minister of Justice, than the present one, to disentangle him from the cumbersome situation and throw smoke screens to disguise his problems from public opinion?
The past times have been fertile in manoeuvres of diversion and “foolishnesses” to hide the responsibilities of the true problems of the country and namely the ethical issues involving the Minister of Defence.
The recent case of the Chief of Staff of the Armed Forces and its magnification by the government and the Minister of Defence is also situated in this attempt to create new smoke screens to hide the Modern University case, the villainies of the labour law package and the real problems of Portuguese society.
Who, like the Minister of Defence, created high expectations in relation to the equipment, careers and visibility of the Armed Forces, who, with demagoguery, promised so much to the veterans and the pensioners, cannot be surprised by the uneasiness, protests and indignation of those who now feel cheated. The pressure and demand that the Minister of Defence, with a loss of authority, is exerting for the resignation of the Chief of Staff, does not represent on the part of government a gain of authority, seriousness or strength, but of weakness, manoeuverism, degradation and lack of straightforwardness. On the eve of the Prime Minister’s call on the President of the Republic, the Government, meaning to pressure the Presidency, anonymously released to the media the news that the Government was thinking about dismissing the Armed Forces Chief of Staff. This is an unacceptable attitude in the relationship of the Government and the Prime Minister with the President of the Republic. But that was not the end of the issue. The Prime Minister’s meeting with the President of the Republic was inconclusive. A new meeting was set for tomorrow. The Prime Minister retreated, undramatized and even wished the journalists a happy weekend. In the middle of the afternoon, the Minister of Defence, through an anonymous source from his office, tells the media that he had lost political confidence in the AMCS. What is this but an intolerable pressure on the President of the Republic? What is this but attempting to make the President of the Republic a mere executor of the dismissal of the Armed Forces Chief of Staff? Besides the lack of respect for the President and the Armed Forces, these attitudes are a demonstration of arrogance, lack of a sense of state, which debase the institutions, institutional relationship and democracy. They are an affront to the President of the Republic and to democratic life.
The Minister of Defence is a factor of instability, democratic discredit, and once again showed that he is not, or has any conditions, to continue as a minister. His dismissal, without any qualms, is a democratic claim and an act of dignifying the institutions.
The country sorely needs a different policy and sorely needs to defeat the anti-social and backward policy of the Government and not diversionary manoeuvres, party quibbles, bellow the belt politics.
The unemployed citizen, the teacher who finds no work, the youth whom is only offered a job without rights and low wages, the families who see their budget dried up before the end of the month by the successive increase in prices, that the official numbers conceal, cannot understand this shouting, these politicking and cannot understand the lack of debate and solutions to the problems.
This shouting to divert attention from the real problems is yet another contribution for the debasement of the institutions and discredit of politics.
The unfulfilling of promises, doing the opposite of the promises, doing things never said during the electoral campaign to garner votes and coming to power like did PSD, leads the citizens to loss of trust, abstention and even disinterest.
It is also unacceptable to try to band all parties under the same label, trying to convey the idea that all parties are equal. Recently you could read in a well-known paper an article with the following headline “all parties were financed by the Modern University”. Then, in the unfolding of the article, “all” referred to PSD, CDS/PP, and PS … We do not accept this amalgamation. The difference has to be shown and PCP has to mark a difference in the exercise of power, to mark a difference in a serious and responsible survey of the problems, to mark a difference in the search of solutions and proposals, to mark a difference in fulfilment of promises.
And I believe that in all these aspects the balance is in our favour.
Those who wish to look at reality without prejudice, cannot fail to recognize that the PCP, in the application of the guidelines and decisions of its 22nd. June National Conference, is carrying out a very intense, qualified and diversified activity on the most heartfelt problems of the workers and large strata of the population and which make the PCP, undoubtedly, the political force most actively engaged in the field of the action, struggle, explanation, combat against the Government policy.
Knowing what these added efforts represent and knowing how much it means in terms of generosity and spirit of sacrifice of the communist militants, we want to continue to be so: in the front line of explanation, the front line of the struggle and presentation of alternative proposals to the policy of the right.
And that is why, after the great action on the Labour Package and Social Security we have just carried out, from here we announce that the Party proposes, during the month of November, a great action of explanation, with a aim of contacting one million Portuguese and that, continuing the denouncement of the Labour Package, will be mainly centred on the cost of living, wages and taxes and Government’s disastrous policies on these matters.
Let us stop the war before it begins!
Our National Meeting is also taking place in an international situation in which the US tries its best to bomb and invade Iraq.
And they no longer conceal that it is their objective to directly and militarily govern the country after the ouster of Saddam Hussein.
But what they still conceal is that their main objective is far from being a struggle against terrorism. Their main objective is the control over Iraqi oil and the control of this region of the world.
On15th. September, the “Washington Post” said that “ in a war against Iraq, oil is the key word” And with some frankness in a “Wall Street Journal “ interview, Bush adviser, Larry Lindsey, said that “changing the Iraqi regime means being able to raise the world production of oil by 3 to 5 million barrels” and candidly continued “ if the war goes well, this will be good for the economy”.
The American oil companies, driven away from Iraq after 1983, also do not hide their impatience that has been going for long. The president of the “Chevron” oil company, in a S. Francisco club, unlocked his soul saying: “Iraq has huge reserves of oil and gas, to which we would love to accede”. What more is there to say? We are in the presence of an American artist ...
In this game of shadows and cynicism played with the rhetoric of human rights, the real reasons of the Bush administration’s great tenacity are beginning to get clearer.
And even resort to blackmail to win support for military action.
CIA director, James Woolsey, has unabashedly said that after the change of regime in Iraq, the non-American companies who have supported Saddam would be excluded from the Iraqi oil. You cannot be clearer.
Public opinion in the several countries where important demonstrations were held, has been gaining conscience of Washington’s real plans and objectives. Also in Portugal this gaining of conscience is important in terms of the war itself, as well as because we have a government ready for all subservience and vassalage. Always ready to compromise the country, the Lages Base and the Armed Forces to the whole designs of US imperialism.
That is why from here we welcome all the explanation actions that were held and the protest actions already marked and namely JCP’s [Youth Communist Organization] initiative in front of the UN office, in Lisbon, next Tuesday.
The intolerable carnage in Bali was immediately seized by Bush who, shamelessly, saw in it new reasons to invade Iraq without further delay.
We affirm that it is necessary to fight terrorism and that we condemn it very clearly, in the past as in the present. And we would like to remind that it was the US and not the progress and peace loving forces who, in the past, financed, armed and organised the “Bin Ladens and Saddam Husseins” of the world.
We do not accept the instrumentalisation of the shocking tragedy of the American people on September 11, to transform the international relations in a crusade of “good” against “Evil”, in the law of the “Far West”, of the “Dead or Alive”; in the civilization clash between West and East; in the world domination by US imperialism.
Bush’s declarations and stands and his rush to place American “nail boots” in that strategic region, clearly show that which is at stake is not US security, neither world security, nor the suffering of the Palestinian people, nor what Sharon´s criminal policy does to the Israeli and Palestinian people.
To Bush and puppet Tony Blair, only the smell of oil matters.
When Saddam Hussein was strong, when American companies were in Iraq and he persecuted his opponents, the Kurds and the communists, Saddam was not dangerous, was a “saintly” defender of human rights. Today, with Iraq destroyed and isolated, but without the presence of American companies, Saddam is already a dangerous threat to the US ...
This is a policy of double standards. From here we salute the peace fighters, we greet the Palestinian people and the Palestinian Authority, whom recently a delegation of our Party directly expressed our full solidarity, and we also salute the forces of peace in Israel, who fight against Sharon´s Zionist and terrorist policy.
We shall continue to loudly utter “Yes to peace, no to war” and demand from the Portuguese Government a policy of peace, a stand which rejects subservience and vassalage, a patriotic and contributing policy for the resolution of the conflicts by political and diplomatic means. As our Party and JCP proclaim: “Let us stop the war, before it begins”...
Yes, a stronger PCP is possible and necessary
In the present international and national situation, the strengthening of the PCP and the strengthening of its organisation and influence in the workplaces and Portuguese society, has a decisive importance.
Our action with the workers is very important to defeat and reverse this policy and the combats of today and tomorrow.
We reaffirm: the workers and the people need a party like the PCP, a party of causes and values, a party which receives from the workers and the people the inspiration, creativity and energy for its revolutionary combat but, at the same time and because of this, is a force the Portuguese men and women, who aspire for a fairer and more fraternal society, the Portuguese men and women, the youth, all those who have lost the capacity for revolt against the political and social quagmire in which the government of the right wants to pull Portugal, the Portuguese men and women who aspire for a different policy and a different behaviour in politics, can trust.
The workers, the people and the country need this Party, its initiative, intervention, struggle, a Party which does not submit nor surrender, a Party which without self-satisfaction or bragging, tries to answer to the problems, presents proposals and alternatives and fights for their application; a Party of men, women and youth for whom generosity, dedication, militancy, energy and engagement centre on the struggle for social justice, deepening of democracy, a Portugal of progress, in an Europe of peace and cooperation, for socialism.