BY MARTÍN KOPPEL
SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico - A sea of fluttering Puerto Rican flags filled the avenue in front of the telephone company's central facility here as striking telephone workers, joined by hundreds of other workers, many on their lunch breaks, rallied June 30 to oppose the sale of the state-owned corporation to a private consortium led by GTE. Some carried signs with the words "Puerto Rico is not for sale," while many marched behind a hand-painted banner declaring "We are a nation."

Although the noontime rally created a huge traffic jam on one of the city's main thoroughfares, many drivers clearly enjoyed becoming part of the action. Dozens drove by waving flags out their windows, dropping contributions into strikers' buckets, and raising a din of honks and shouts of approval.

"See you Tuesday!" yelled a passing bus driver as he joined the honking chorus. He was referring to the general strike called for June 7 and 8.

Three thousand delegates representing a coalition of trade unions met in the San Juan suburb of Carolina June 28 and approved a proposal to launch the general strike. The purpose of the nationwide work stoppage, called by the Broad Committee of Labor Organizations (CAOS), is to join the 6,400 telephone workers in protesting the sale of the phone company and to oppose the plans by Gov. Pedro Rosselló to continue selling state-owned enterprises to capitalist investors.

The strike by the 4,400 members of the Independent Telephone Workers Union (UIET) and the 2,000 members of the Independent Brotherhood of Telephone Workers (HIETEL), began June 18 after the senate in this U.S. colony voted to approve the sale. Rosselló subsequently signed the bill for the sale of the Puerto Rico Telephone Company (PRTC).

The general strike, which will mostly involve public employees, will affect basic services and facilities such as the ports, the electric company, public transportation, and water and sewage plants. Teachers, most of whom are on summer break, pledged to join the picket lines. The 53 unions in CAOS have 150,000 members.

`Not just a phone workers strike'
"This is not just a telephone workers strike - it's a strike of the people," said Teresa Concepción, 35, echoing a comment made by a number of workers interviewed by the Militant, both on the picket lines and in the street.

Concepción has been traveling more than an hour every day from the town of San Lorenzo to join the picket line at the telephone company's main office at 1500 Roosevelt Avenue. "I'm not a phone worker," she said. "I used to work at the Gibraltar military clothing factory, but they're shutting down the plant and I just got laid off." She was accompanied by her co-worker Lidia Quiñones, 35, who had also gotten her layoff notice.

Next to them was Ivette Rivera, 58, a secretary whose two grandchildren work at the telephone company. "I'm here for them," she declared. "I get off work at 3:00 p.m. and it sometimes takes me almost an hour to get here. And let me tell you, I'm happy! I wish the general strike had already begun."

Contingents of workers from other unions join the picket lines every day, particularly from the electrical workers, water workers, teachers, and health workers unions.

It's hard to go far in San Juan, Puerto Rico's capital, and not run into a picket line. The two biggest concentrations of pickets - with numbers ranging from a few dozen to the hundreds - gather at the main headquarters and at Plaza Celulares Telefónica, the facility for beepers and cellular phones. There are 150 picket lines around the island.

Working people have contributed tens of thousands of dollars to support the strikers. "Here at Roosevelt Avenue, in a week we've collected $25,000 in cash contributions," reported Norma Coriano Báez, 33, who works repairing phones at the facility in the suburb of Bayamón. "A lot of people bring us bread, drinks, fruit, and sandwiches."

Workers and students have held dozens of solidarity rallies around the island. UTIER, the electrical workers union, held a three-day walkout in support of the phone workers June 23-25. The water workers union UIA staged a one- day strike. On June 24, the UIA picketed the central offices of the water authority with demands about their own contract and then marched to Plaza Celulares Telefónica; 4,000 people, including taxi drivers with their vehicles, took part in the noon rally there.

The same day, the Teamsters and Port Authority workers shut down the Isla Grande complex, which includes the commuter airport, docks, and government offices.

In Mayaguez, on the western tip of the island, 500 people picketed the PRTC offices.

On June 27, after big-business commentators warned that the picket lines were supposedly too dangerous for women, the Puerto Rican Organization of Working Women and Committee of Women Against Privatization organized a march of 1,000 women supporters of the strike, some of whom carried a giant Puerto Rican flag. Among the marchers was Lolita Lebrón, one of the five Nationalist heroes who spent a quarter century as political prisoners in U.S. jails for their pro- independence activities.

Students join picket lines
The telephone workers' picket lines have been a pole of attraction for hundreds of high school and university students. Gazer Sued, a student at the University of Puerto Rico and members of the Student Front, explained that students have been on the picket lines on a daily basis from the beginning of the strike.

At the June 30 rally, which drew about 500 people, Nelson Díaz, 16, whose father is a striker, waved a sign with Rosselló's picture and the words "Judas Iscariot" below. "If Puerto Rico was independent, we would be the owners of our country and GTE couldn't just come and buy the telephone company against the will of the people," Díaz said. He added that he is pro-independence but his father is not.

Rosselló, of the pro-statehood New Progressive Party (PNP), pushed through the sale of the telephone company. This effort began however, in 1990 under the previous administration of Gov. Rafael Hernández Colón, whose Popular Democratic Party (PPD) favors the colonial "commonwealth" status quo. In an interview, UIET general secretary José Acosta noted that Hernández Colón backed off his privatization plan at the time, partly due to resistance by the unions.

A consortium that is headed by the U.S. communications giant GTE and includes the local Banco Popular is buying just over 50 percent of the shares in the company. Three percent of the shares would be given to employees, who would have the option to buy an additional 3 percent. The remaining 44 percent would remain in the hands of the government for now, although Rosselló has said he would like to sell it off too.

The government has already sold some hospitals, hotels, the major shipping company, a pineapple farm and processing plant, and some prisons. The electrical company, water authority, and other services may be next on the chopping block.

`Fighting to defend national patrimony'
"Yes, it's true that I and others would probably be laid off if the phone company is privatized. But the main reason we're on strike is to defend our national patrimony," said Cecilia Ortiz, a HIETEL union member with 18 years' service. This comment was almost universal among strikers interviewed by the Militant.

"This is one of the country's most profitable assets, and the income from it shouldn't go to the United States or Spain; it should stay here," she remarked. "It belongs to us."

Ortiz pointed to a slogan pasted on a wall that said, "What do we want 3 percent for, if we are the owners of 100 percent?" referring to the 3 percent stock option offered company employees.

The government argues for the privatization, saying that the government should not run businesses, that the PRTC needs "flexibility" to compete in the world market, and that the income resulting from the sale is needed to help subsidize a number of government projects, from the water authority to the colonial government's retirement plan, which Acosta said has a deficit of $5 billion.

In an interview, HIETEL president Annie Cruz emphasized that the sale of the PRTC would lead to rate increases. She also noted that Rosselló had refused to talk to union officials. The phone workers unions, Cruz said, were suggesting that if the government refused to reverse the sale of the phone company, it should at least organize a referendum on the question.

Several workers said indignantly that the sale was a giveaway to GTE. Of the $1.875 billion price tag, GTE will pay only $375 million in cash and the rest will be financed with a loan from Citibank.

Some strikers point out that when the phone company was privately owned before - by ITT - the service wasn't better; it was notoriously worse, which in fact forced the Puerto Rico government to purchase the company for $165 million in 1974.

Cecilia Ortiz recalled that at that time, "many Puerto Ricans, including my family, which lives in the countryside, still had no telephone service at all" - a telling sign of Puerto Rico's colonial status. Since then, that has changed, but today there are higher expectations about acceptable living standards and a growing refusal to accept cutbacks in those living conditions.

Government propaganda campaign
The convergence of labor resistance and national pride around the telephone workers strike, whose banner and symbol is the Puerto Rican flag, has made this a deeply popular struggle. The Rosselló government, surprised by the widespread response, has been working overtime to undercut this support through a crude campaign of violence-baiting and intimidation. The daily papers regularly run front-page headlines about alleged sabotage of phone lines, in a clear effort to blame the strikers. No charges have been filed against any strikers for sabotage.

The colonial House of Representatives ran a full-page ad in the local newspapers with text of a resolution it had adopted June 29. The heading read "Enough! The telephone strike is just an excuse by a small group of agitators and political extremists who seek to impose themselves through violence, threats, and sabotage. Puerto Rico must not tolerate nor yield in face of this...."

Police superintendent Pedro Toledo has led the charge in this public campaign, branding students and university professors as "outside agitators" and a "small group of leftists," who he has blamed for violence. A June 30 headline in the San Juan Star, for example, read "Toledo says PRTC strike may become a `revolution.' " The police chief has singled out two professors, Rafael Bernabe, president of the Puerto Rican Association of University Professors, and Julio Muriente, who is the head of the New Puerto Rican Independence Movement (NMIP), in a not-so- subtle threat to arrest them.

The students and university professors "have the right to picket and help," said Nivia Rivera, a striking member of UIET, because "this is a strike of the people. Everyone has the right to be here" on the picket lines.

Strikers pointed to the police and their brutal methods as the true source of violence on the picket lines. Police attacks on the pickets left 15 people injured in the first days of the strike. The cops were attacking unionists for trying to block supervisory personnel from entering the PRTC facilities. Toledo has begun floating warnings about bringing in the National Guard against "anarchy and extreme violence."

Rulers debate course
Other strikers said the government's campaign around "subversives" had limited credibility because of previous exposures of efforts by the FBI and local political police to disrupt the labor and independence movements over the past two decades.

In face of this resistance, the controversy over the telephone company sale has created a crisis and deepened divisions in the big-business political parties in the island, the PNP and PPD. Some leaders of the PPD - which has waffled over the issue -have publicly pleaded for the party to take a position in favor of the strike and to maintain a presence at the picket lines, in hopes that the strike's popularity will rub off on them and give them an edge over the ruling pro-statehood party. A few dissident voices have even been heard in the PNP.

The Puerto Rican Independence Party (PIP) has expressed support for the telephone workers strike by appealing to the government for "dialogue" with the unions.

Meanwhile, organizations fighting for the release of independentista political prisoners and against the U.S. military's massive presence in Puerto Rico announced that the July 4 demonstration they had planned near the Roosevelt Roads military base in eastern Puerto Rico was changed to San Juan. The march will begin at Fort Buchanan -where the U.S. Southern Command, previously in Panama, is being transferred to -and will end up at the telephone workers picket lines.

Ron Richards contributed to this article.  
 
 
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