HASSI R’MEL, ALGERIA, November 1 — The Arab Spring that overturned three neighboring dictatorships has been meaningless for natural gas workers in Algeria, who still suffer from the capitalists dominating the country. They’ve been fighting for back pay and are demanding a 30% wage hike.
On October 27, about 400 workers sat in at the Sonatrach regional headquarters here, the site of Africa’s biggest natural gas field, and attempted a second one two days later. On October 30, the movement spread to workers in the Amont division, who staged a protest outside company headquarters in Algiers.
Multinational Sonatrach is Africa’s biggest oil-and-gas company and the 12th biggest in the world. It has 22 subsidiaries and employed 48,062 workers in 2010.
Rank-and-file workers say they will radicalize their movement if management does not meet their demands. In particular, they’re threatening to repudiate their newly elected union representatives for failing to back their demands, which also include an end to the job promotions freeze.
The movement began in the summer, after management failed to pay the wage hikes obtained in the April 2011 union contract. In June, the workers upped their demands to a 25% across-the-board wage hike (now 30%) instead of the previous contract’s 8% to 25%, depending on one’s work category.
Since then, the workers have held numerous meetings and general assemblies and have drawn up a 15-point platform of demands.
Currently the company is somewhat on the defensive, scrambling to mail out checks to cover the April increases that were never paid. Obviously, they’re trying to buy off the workers and nip the protest movement in the bud before a majority of the rank and file swing over to demanding a completely new contract.
The bold actions and demands of these Algerian gas workers are a beacon to workers around the world. But as the Sonatrach workers know, the ink is barely dry on a union contract when the bosses — with the help of their junior partners in the union leadership — begin to chip away at everything the workers have won. That’s why the only way our class can make real gains is by destroying capitalism altogether through communist revolution.J