In the last 12 months, 3,300 layoffs occurred in factories and companies from the private sector, where workers do not have trade unions that serve to defend their right to employment.

Costa Rica’s working class is currently in a state of political orphans resulting from defeat in the 1948 War. At that moment, trade unions and class organizations were subjected to policies that ensured both a quick debacle and loss of legitimacy that took them almost to extinction during the second half of the previous century. This opened the way to solidarity associations as the «legitimate» interlocutors between workers and bosses, and became an instrument at the service of reconciliation and demobilization.

The founding of the Second Republic carried a set of anti-Communist and anti-worker laws presented as “progressives”, in order to erase any labor organization achieved by the Communist Party and to take the struggles of the working class to a state of numbness. It was through this scheme that the bourgeoisie, grouped in the National Liberation Party, created a «bad reputation» of the class struggle and of all who divulged it.

Employees of private companies are definitely the most exposed to the worsening of living conditions and lack of job prospects, as they are subject to a system where unionizing is illegal, although «legally» it is a «right» . Even more precarious is the situation in the “free zones” where the working class has no rights. Manufacturing sector, which generates almost 25% of the country’s output and employs about 11.63% of the working population, has laid-off more than 3,300 people in the last 12 months due to bourgeois criteria of cost and benefit .

Furthermore, despite all the benefits and exemptions foreign capital companies are leaving the country, because they believe that there are still many «privileges» for workers (such as payment of minimum wage and extra hours, paid holidays, etc). The great amount of foreign companies leaving the country (the last one announcing its departure has been the company in toiletries “Punto Rojo” that will leave without job more than 170 people) shows how the paradise picture painted by president Arias and his henchmen during the discussion about the free trade area with the U.S, is only the capitalists paradise.

Soon after Intel left the country, manufacturing production has slowed down and the discussion about the model of investing in Costa Rica has arised. Employers’ proposition is more openness and labor flexibility, less government interference and the privatization of education, health and electricity production. From the New Socialist Party (NPS) we defend the organization of the workers class in order to defend their jobs.

«With our campaign of exposures we separate the tares from the wheat,» Lenin wrote. The tares being the employers who believe that salary increase of 2,35% is too much, and do not take responsibility for the layoffs and unemployment rising generated by that decision. The tares being the union’s bureaucracies that applaud this miserable wage increase in the private sector and ask for 4,14% in the public sector, but who do not put up a fight to make the voice of the thousands of workers who are exploited day after day be heard. The tares being PAC’s government and its plans of conceding small things that maintain a climate of «social peace» while planning a tax reform to attack wages.

The NPS «argues that any attempt to articulate a socialist emancipation project must have the centrality of the working class as their prime strategy». The NPS plans to contribute to the huge task of organizing the working class of the country, achieving the unionization of workers from the private sector, who generate the country’s wealth and have great revolutionary potential.

These plans require developing exposure activities because «only with those exposures political consciousness and revolutionary activity can be infused to the masses.» Therefore the National Conference of our Party, conducted on 24-26 of July, took as one of its central resolutions to develop a campaign aimed at the industrial working class, focusing in the right to organize and denouncing the «reign of terror» that prevails inside factories and companies along the country.

This campaign will be promoted in the universities and trade unions where the NPS participates, but we will also take it to the gates factories and bus and trains stations where thousands of workers pass every day in their way to “free zones” factories. We invite you to contribute to this NPS’ campaign.