After the downfall of the fascist dictatorship Portuguese worken began to flex their muscles launching militant struggles against the starvation wages which almost half a centary of ruthless dictatorship had imposed on them, for under the old regime, and for the immediate dismissal of reactionary managers.
a while they could count on the armed forces to sort thing out either by putting pressure on the workers to call off their struggles or by sending troops in to break them up.
But recently the army has not been able to deliver the goods. The workers have become even better organised and more class conscious, many sections of the army cordinary soldiers and lower rank officers) sympathy with them and even the top brass are either trying to balance between the capitalists and the workers, or are afraid of a show down.
So the capitalists, unable to crack down on the worken through the usual weapons of the state machine, have turned ta asing theit economic power and launched a wave of deliberate economic sabotage. Many companies have been the reinstatement of militant workers who had been victimised The capitalists were not at all happy about these derelop ments, and did everything in their power to comhat them. For deliberately cutting back in production and trying to lay off workers in onder to break their militancy, All workers' demands are resisted ferociously, management often refusing 10 pay workers their wages, and in some cases just ahandon ing their factories altogether.
Among the worst offenders are the hig multi-national fires who rushed eagerly into fascist Portugal in order to take advantage of cheap labour, and are now unwilling to pay even the abysmal legal minimum wage of E13 a week Many of these companies have jast polled up the carpet and suddently disappeared from the country, leaving empty factores and unemployed workers belind.
As a result there are now something like a quarter of a million workers unemployed in Portugal-equivalest to about 2 million out of work in this country.
But the Portuguese workers are not taking this lying down. They are pushing their fight forwand to get to the root of this new problem, in some cases waging struggles to establish workers' control over the capitalist management, and in others taking over abandoned factories and running them.
after the expericnce of anti-bureaucratic struggle there in recent years mant's economic reforms and efforts to Dr Markovic showed how the Goverhave had severely damaging effects on the Ile institutions means that all the decisive issues He pointed out that the solacion to the political problems of the working class in a country like Yugoslavia does not lie in aban doniny strong central political institutions workers demands. materials.