Argentina - November 12 2022

Furlán’s “political solution”: kneeling the UOM before the exploitative Cristina, the PJ, the slaver Rocca and the UIA bosses

Out with the bosses of our union!
May CFK go to the UIA!
The UOM belongs to the workers!

National Metallurgical Workers Congress with delegates elected in assembly and with mandate, to vote on a plan of struggle and to recover the UOM for the workers

On November 4, Furlán’s union bureaucracy of the UOM took dozens of metallurgical workers to the Pilar Plenary Meeting to kneel them before Kirchner, the PJ and the government, with the perspective of the 2023 elections, deceiving that this is how we are going to meet our demands. Scoundrels and traitors! This rally was plagued of politician bosses and traitorous bureaucrats like Yasky, Baradel and even Caló himself. A true infamy and mockery of metalworkers.

This is Furlán’s “political solution”, the old trap of “There is 2019” used to divert the struggle and hatred to the Macri government after the tons of stones that fell on Congress in 2017, where we metallurgists were in the first line of combat while his “friend” Caló fled like a rat. The “political solution” for Furlán and Kirchner is together with his friend Paolo Rocca, who in the middle of the pandemic fired 1,500 Techint workers while being subsidized by the government’s ATP and who, in addition, leaks millions of dollars through his offshorecompanies in Uruguay. Furlán’s “political solution” is together with De Mendiguren, member of the Argentine Industrial Union; they have both “inspected” Toyota and showed it as an example of control and exploitation of workers, the same one taking place in Siderar by the largest steel company in the country. May Kirchner go to do her rally to the UIA with the great bosses and take Furlán with her… THE UOM BELONGS TO THE WORKERS!

In her speech, Cristina spoke of ‘dreaming again’ and ‘returning to the joy of the years of Kirchneris’, without saying that at that time there were more than 7,000 worker fighters prosecuted; that Daniel Solano and Julio López disappeared, Mariano Ferreyra , Carlos Fuentealba, the workers of the Indoamericano were murdered, like Kosteki and Santillán under the Peronist government. In the face of these anti-worker scoundrels Furlán takes the UOM to honor them! The Kirchners are fighting for first place as repressors of workers with radicals like Alfonsin when they assassinated the militants of La Tablada with white phosphorus or the 40 assassinated in the 1989 hunger uprising... and on the Corrientes bridge with de La Rúa and his 40 deaths on December 30, 2001.

In addition, Kirchner recalled when in her government “the salary was enough.” That’s a huge lie. In 2015, she was the one who imposed the miserable limit of 27% on collective bargains. Today her government is throwing inflation and the adjustment demanded by the IMF on us workers. That is why she strongly supported Massa. She and her government are responsible for the fact that hundreds of thousands of workers have their wages stolen with the profit tax.
This is what they defended in 2006, when they brutally repressed the oil workers of Las Heras, who were fighting to have this tax removed, and later sentenced them to life imprisonment for fighting. Kirchner and her government belong to Techint, to Chevrón, they belong to the “domestic industry,” those factories that are true death rows that work with obsolete machines, where the sensors do not work, where they exploit us the most, where hundreds of workers are mutilated or just die due to bosses’ negligence, as happened recently in Dalafer or CordMold (ex-Roma) in Córdoba.
Cristina and Furlán proposed a “non-remunerative bonus” to appease inflation. Some nerve they’ve got! We don’t give up our fight for wages for some handouts from the bosses! That is why in the stands, workers sang “The UOM wants a raise!” Nobody thinks that with a bonus and earning $80,000 pesos a month we are going to face inflation, job insecurity and super-exploitation.

What can be expected from the UOM bureaucracy, which, when the tire workers were fighting over wages, sat down with Massa, the SMATA bureaucracy and the bosses to discuss how to break the comrades’ strike? This is how these scabs prepare to surrender our fight for better salaries. That is why in the middle of the rally they silenced the workers who whistled and insulted Caló. “No, guys, we all have to be united,” said Cristina, the boss. “All united”… she, the bosses and the scabs of the union bureaucracy against the workers.

Together, and to take care of the bosses’ large profits, they seek to guarantee the subjugation of the workers, with their police methods inside the factories, with workers who cannot express themselves and have their hands tied by the bureaucracy and the gun pointed to the head by the bosses. That is why Furlán vindicates Lorenzo Miguel, the biggest traitor of Villazo who was on the opposite side of the metallurgical workers of Villa Constitución who fought in the ‘70s, organizing triple A with the Peronist government together with Martínez de Hoz from the Acindar employers’. Lorenzo Miguel was behind the operation to exterminate the “Red Serpent of Paraná” in ‘75, just like the damn Peronist government called the metallurgical workers and the industrial cordon, sending more than 4,000 policemen, the Pumas (the paramilitary organization of Santa Fe), the Gendarmerie, the intelligence services and the Peronist Trade Union Youth. This operation was also supported by the Air Force, Prefecture and other repressive forces. Murderers!
While the employers amass enormous fortunes like the slaver Rocca -to whom Cristina and her government awarded him the million-dollar business of the Vaca Muerta gas pipeline-, the workers are outsourced, super-exploited and are fired whenever they want, just as they do at Tenaris SIAT. That is why this rally was not that of those fired from the UOM who are fighting for their jobs. There were no demands from the thousands of super-exploited workers in the UOM workshops, receiving $80,000 pesos a month, outsourced, working 12 hours a day to be able to bring a plate of food home. Let’s see if that bourgeois Kirchner would get up at 5 in the morning, leaving her children all day to work 12 hours as a slave in a factory! Scoundrel, exploiter and repressor of workers!

The “union solution” is not going to come with any boss variant or by the hand of these business bureaucrats, but by tens of thousands of metalworkers taking to the streets together with the workers in struggle and with the national strike to put their foot in the chest to the government, the employers and the union bureaucracy, who are under the command of Ambassador Stanley and the IMF, to recover everything they have stolen from us. We must recover the UOM for the workers!

La Gota - Metallurgical Bulletin
Rank-and-File Siderar Workers