FDLP-Ecuador: OSUNTRAMSA LEADERS, NOBOA’S DOGS

We hereby share an unofficial translation of a statement published by the Defense Front of the Peoples’ Struggles in Ecuador.

Until a few years ago, OSUNTRAMSA [Translator’s note: Unique Union Organization of Public Workers of the Ministry of Healthcare], an organization that brings together Ecuadorian health workers, was recognized for its combativeness against the State and for being a benchmark in the defense of the interests of workers and the people. It represented a bastion of struggle amid the advance of bureaucratic capitalism and the bourgeois-big landlord regime.

Today, under the corrupt leadership of Jorge Moncayo Chica, that organization has been turned into an instrument of the old State, another cog in the corporate machinery that seeks to tame the union movement and subordinate it to the plans of imperialism and the big bourgeoisie. Moncayo and his accomplices are not leaders, they are agents of class conciliation, servile to the fascist government of Daniel Noboa, kneeling to guarantee the stability of the regime and curb the independent organization of workers.

The betrayal was clearly evident when OSUNTRAMSA, under this rotten leadership, joined the march called by the government to intimidate the National Court of Justice. That action was the seal of surrender: legitimizing Noboa’s repressive policy.

Moncayo has cowardly been using a narrative that relies on his supposed collaboration with the government for the signing of the collective agreement.

The signing of the collective agreement, as it has always been, can only be the result of the struggle of workers, their interests and aspirations, enshrined in the framework of rights and historical achievements. It can never be the result of Moncayo’s negligence in “negotiating” the terms of its signing with the regime, much less a blank check endorsed by the conscience of those who struggle, in exchange for institutionalizing misery, job insecurity, and the dismantling of public health.

In the last election campaign within OSUNTRAMSA, Moncayo promised to sign the collective agreement. Yet another farce by this miserable opportunist. Today, that signature does not depend on the will and struggle of the workers, but on the blackmail of Noboa’s fascist regime, which makes it conditional on the degree of submission, collusion, and complicity of the leadership with the government’s starvation policies.

Health workers should not get their hopes up. Nothing good can come from a collective agreement manipulated by a regime that cuts budgets, liquidates historic gains, and undermines the very foundations of public health. This supposed “achievement” will be nothing more than a trap to legitimize the surrender of rights and subject the union to the government’s fascist and dictatorial political line.

The statements made by David Quishpe, OSUNTRAMSA’s organizational secretary, leave no doubt as to the political stance of these henchmen: “We are 16,400 workers and we support the Minister of Labor and the Noboa government because it has opened its arms to allow workers to make significant changes to their labor rights”; statements that do not reflect the feelings of the rank-and-file workers, much less when this regime is laying off workers, attempting to impose hourly contracts, opening the doors to the privatization of public health areas and services, cutting the health budget by approximately $1.2 billion, and condemning the popular sectors to a health system without medicines or supplies. These statements reflect that this leadership has ceased to belong to the workers and has become an appendage of bourgeois-big landlord power.

The task of health workers and the entire labor movement is to unmask and defeat this servile leadership, recovering OSUNTRAMSA as a tool of class combat, capable of confronting the fascist government and its policies of hunger, misery, and surrender. These are not mere traitors, but political enemies of the working class, accomplices of an anti-popular regime that sustains the old State.

Today more than ever, in the face of the regime’s offensive and the capitulation of the union leadership, the path is clear: organize, combat, and resist, building a class-conscious, combative, and revolutionary unionism at the service of workers and the people.

Beyond condemning and combating this horde of wretches, we want to salute the consistent and conscious attitude of the members of the National Executive who refused to mobilize their rank and file in the march called by Noboa. These comrades, and all those who remain steadfast with the working class and our people, are called upon to raise a red union line within OSUNTRAMSA, capable of crushing the opportunism of the current leadership and restoring the organization’s combative and class character.

DOWN WITH THE OPPORTUNISTIC LEADERSHIP OF OSUNTRAMSA!

DOWN WITH THE TRAITORS OF HEALTH WORKERS!

FOR A CLASS-CONSCIOUS, REVOLUTIONARY, ANTI-IMPERIALIST, AND ANTI-ELECTORAL LINE!