Algeria: ‘We’re fed up!’ Workers’ Wildcat Shuts Postal System

ALGIERS, January 11 — Ninety-five percent of Algeria’s postal workers are defying the government and continuing their illegal wildcat strike for the twelfth straight day. They’re demanding the firing of both the general director of Algérie Poste and the general secretary of the official trade union, an affiliate of the General Union of Algerian Workers (UGTA).
The strikers are demanding payment of a 30% wage hike due since January 1, 2008; payment of overtime hours worked in 2011; respect for all the demands won in their June 2011 strike; payment of the 2011 bonus; a wage raise and an investigation of Mohamed Laid Mahloul’s mismanagement, particularly of the promotions granted since he became general director. Eighty percent of the 30,000 postal workers say they’ve not received promotions due them.
The postal strike could seriously affect the functioning of the nation. Over two million retirees receive their retirement checks through the postal service. Some 13 million people of the country’s 34 million bank at the postal offices.
On January 10, post offices remained closed, without even minimum service. Strikers ignored repeated calls by the UGTA, the only union the government recognizes, to return to work. Promises by the minister for the postal service to carry out the January 7 agreement between the government and the UGTA fell on deaf ears.
“We’re fed up with ‘we’re going to do this, we’re going to do that.’ It’s been going on for years, and today, we want something concrete and not press releases,” a striker shouted at a January 10 rally outside the Grande Poste, an Algiers landmark.
A strikers’ committee is supposed to meet with ministry officials on January 12 but the minister won’t be there. “No, he doesn’t have the time,” the workers said. “He prefers to go to the Club des pins [the exclusive, tightly guarded Algiers luxury beachfront].”
People who believed the false information about the strike’s effect broadcast by national and local radio stations were frustrated at finding the Ain Defla city post office closed, but they expressed their solidarity with the strikers and held the government responsible. One person shouted:  “They should give the workers their rights and stop penalizing the users!”
 On January 9, hundreds of postal workers from every corner of Algeria demonstrated in front of the Grande Poste, chanting “We are workers, we are not thieves!” Workers were continuing their sit-in. Strikers were waving signs and engaging in lively discussion with the public.
“By manipulating the media and public opinion, they’re setting the citizens against us,” a 40-year-old postal worker said indignantly. “Management makes us seem irresponsible and lazy!”
The postal ministry and the UGTA keep saying the conflict is “settled, that “major advances have been chalked up” and that demands will be met, but the strikers view these as empty promises since government ministers are implicated in widespread corruption while enjoying total immunity. That’s why postal workers insist that the corrupt general director of Algérie Poste and the corrupt general secretary of the postworkers’ union resign.
The strikers refuse to be bought off with the January 7 agreement that granted the 2011 bonus, promotions due them and a $382 “encouragement” bonus if the workers returned. They have been lied to time after time.
The militancy and defiance of the government by the wildcatting strikers is to be applauded. Their walkout and resulting shutdown of the postal service only proves that without the working class capitalism cannot function. But since the capitalists hold state power, any reforms the strikers do win are subject to be taken away, whether through higher taxes, layoffs or privatization or any of the myriad of ways the bosses can manipulate their system.
As long as the profit system exists, workers will find themselves in a continuous struggle to keep their heads above water. Only the complete destruction of this hellish system and creation of a worker-controlled society — communism — will free the working class from this exploitative treadmill.
Late Bulletin, January 13 — Strikers ended their 13-day strike, winning their retroactive pay hike, providing for promotions based on the work they actually perform, integration of the annual bonus into the union contract and provision for early retirement on substantial pensions.