PORT-AU-PRINCE, HAITI — The struggle of healthcare union workers in the General Hospital proves that capitalism can’t provide healthcare for the working class. This hospital is the only one in the country open to the working class. The workers in this hospital make miserable wages of $100-$125 monthly. That’s less than the country’s minimum wage!
To add insult to injury, the services this hospital provides do not meet the patients’ needs. Patients must pay before receiving any medical care. The few who are able to pay can’t even be treated properly because medical equipment is “borrowed” by the doctors for use in their own private practices.
The government ignores this hospital because the rich doesn’t use it; they go to private hospitals. The government does not provide the needed budget. Most of the budget goes to the training and maintaining of the national police who repress workers’ anger about their situation. In fact, despite the high numbers of residents that have Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder due to the earthquake, only one percent of the budget funds mental care services. That is less than $10,000 for the whole country!
The process to privatize this hospital has begun, similar to the privatization of schools that occurred in the 19th century. The government began giving the public schools’ money to the Catholic Church so it could open the “Faith and Happiness” schools. This served to keep much of the working class illiterate in the same way privatizing the General Hospital will sentence more workers to death.
Workers at this hospital, along with university students, have organized protests, sit-ins, and press conferences to condemn the bosses’ neglect of this hospital. This class struggle is important and courageous, given the extreme fascist repression and racism they face. This struggle also unmasks President Martelly’s unkept promises made during the election campaign to give healthcare to all, similar to Obama’s promises to extend healthcare to all.
During this struggle, the Health Minister stepped down and the hospital director was transferred to another hospital so that the workers would have a hard time directing their anger at someone specific and therefore deflating their struggle.
PLP brought a communist analysis to all of these struggles. We have exposed the unions’ misleadership of not fighting for the unity of these hospital workers with their patients. This has allowed the bosses to continue dividing our class by not confronting the lies they push when they blame the union for all of the hospital’s problems.
We have distributed Defi (CHALLENGE in Kreyòl) and exposed how the union misleadership helps the bosses make more profits off the workers. We have explained that capitalism, a system of profits, will never give our class the healthcare we need. Only under communism, a system run by workers to meet the needs of all workers, without bosses, their state and inequality, will we free ourselves from the murderous chains of this system.