The accusations
against the bank clerks’ health care scheme of peddling tampered
medicine to cancer and HIV/AIDS patients have become so scandalous that
the social welfare fund has been placed under national trusteeship — is
the government pearl jewelry also contemplating intervention in a union electoral
process which has yielded more than one eternal boss along the lines of
Zanola in the world of organized labour? Next Wednesday’s election in
the bank clerks’ union will be a very good indication of just how
important such reforms are.
Quite apart from the fact that other pearl necklace unions (including the press and
gambling sectors, as well as airline cabin staff) are coming under the
same suspicion as Zanola, the wildcat phenomenon is not only
underground — the workers of the Kraft Foods plant in General Pacheco
have been occupying the factory for nearly a month to protest the
layoffs of over 150 militant workers who had been disrupting operations
since early July. Few enough workers (especially beyond the heavyweight
unions) ever completed the collective wage bargaining pearl ring process in the
normal season of late summer and this naturally makes for instability
in an economic cycle characterized by stagflation. The government might
have other priorities and might see organized labour bosses as natural
allies but it ignores this situation at its peril.