The following leaflet was distributed by Progressive Labor Party members in Mexico at a march of thousands of angry workers. The next day, those workers voted in a referendum that rejected the raise agreed upon by management and the sellout (charro) union. A week later, these thieves imposed a new 4 percent raise on the base salary scale, far short of the 10 percent demanded by workers. The dissidents in the rank-in-file remain in the struggle and have called for new protests. PLers will be there, shoulder to shoulder with our class brothers and sisters in the fightback, calling for communist revolution every step of the way.
Following the pro-boss, anti-rank-and-file outcome of the Extraordinary National Congress of the National Union of Social Security Workers (SNTSS) on September 12, workers launched courageous protests against the meager 2.9 percent raise applied directly to the pay scale (the 1.75 percent increase under Clause 157 goes straight into the pockets of the Afores, the private pension fund managers); against the abandonment of the defense of the Retirement and Pension System (RJP) in favor of the multimillion-peso profits of private pension funds; against the approval of clauses in the Collective Bargaining Agreement (CCT) designed to repress and eliminate union dissent; and against the union’s complicity with management in failing to denounce the shortages of supplies, medicine and staff needed to care for the beneficiaries of the Mexican Social Security Institute (IMSS).
As a result of this blatant betrayal, workers are also demanding the removal of the Union’s “leader,” Dr. Rafael Olivos Hernández, and of the National Executive Committee (CEN). Historically, the union leadership has bowed to the will of management and of whichever party is in power, serving the interests of the capitalist elite that holds power in Mexico.
Attacks on working conditions and pensions, and cuts to public health services for the benefit of private medicine’s profits, have been a constant for at least the last five decades; the leadership has colluded with management to carry out these attacks and betray the rank and file. But that is not all: its leaders have been an integral part of this process as members of the ruling party of the day and, generally, as federal deputies or senators who legislate these very attacks, which harm workers and the beneficiaries who depend on these services and who have watched them deteriorate and shrink.
Union misleaders & capitalist bosses steal from working class
Union leaders have served as legislators, in the past for the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and now for Morena, as is the case with Rafael Olivos, who is the alternate deputy for the union’s former general secretary, Arturo Olivares Cerda. These shameless cynics hold both union and legislative posts, and are active accomplices in the attacks on labor rights and on the population’s health: actions entirely contrary to what their positions stand for, both as unionists and as representatives of a party that calls itself left-wing, just as happens in the National Union of Education Workers (SNTE). We must organize as a working class so that, through a communist revolution, we send this scum to the dustbin of history, where they truly belong.
The demands of IMSS workers, despite their particularities, are very similar to those of the workers of the National Coordinating Committee of Education Workers (CNTE): wage increases, dignified and fair retirement, and adequate working conditions to provide the essential, basic services the working population needs —education and health—, which are under attack by the greed of capitalists who seek to turn them into commodities to line their pockets at the expense of millions of workers.
PLP supports workers fighting to end the bosses’ tyranny
Just as with the CNTE, which we have stood alongside in its struggle for decades, we communists of the Progressive Labor Party (PLP) express our solidarity with the IMSS workers in resistance and respectfully call on them to broaden their struggle to end this system of capitalist oppression and build a communist society of social equality, where laws serve the majority of the working population and punish exploitation, racism, sexism and anti-working-class conduct.
The marches by hundreds of workers to the Union headquarters; the failed negotiations with the Ministry of the Interior (Secretaría de Gobernación), the Union and management; and the harassment and repression by riot police (the granaderos, supposedly disbanded by Sheinbaum) to clear the streets and entrances all reveal the repressive, anti-working-class nature of the self-proclaimed Fourth Transformation (4T). It shares DNA with the PRI and the Partido Acción Nacional,(PAN), but what sets it apart and makes it more dangerous is that it presents itself as progressive and pro-working-class, while in practice it serves the same interests: those of the parasitic, super-rich elite that holds power and controls the companies that also invest in the big private medical conglomerates, private universities and the multimillion-peso pension funds.
By January 2027, the 4T intends to impose the Universal Health Service (SUS). To do so, it needs to impose minimum working conditions on all workers in the sector; that is why it seeks to do away with the IMSS CCT and continue the neoliberal “achievements” of the PAN and PRI administrations that eliminated the RJP. This casualization of labor will directly result in deficient health services, to the detriment of the working class and to the benefit of the national and international capitalist class.
Capitalist healthcare robs workers
The capitalist health system is, by any measure, deficient and inadequate. The IMSS administration claims it wants to solve the problem b
y increasing workloads and eroding the wages and benefits of health workers, which only makes the service worse.
The only option for those of us who work in health and education is to organize and unite with the entire working class to confront these thieves and their attacks and, ultimately, to organize into a party to make a communist revolution that ends this corrupt society of inequality, full of parasitic bosses, traitorous union leaders, political hacks and lying electoral parties.
In a communist society, the health system will be run by and for workers. Its goal will not be to generate profit, as it is today, but to ensure that working people lead healthy, full lives.
