Havana/The Cuban Workers’ Union (CTC), the union controlled by the Communist Party, is experiencing low hours, especially in the private sector, which it cannot seduce. The organization’s newspaper, which a year ago he created a union bureau for “new economic actors” precisely to attract them, stated this Sunday that among the more than two million members in the country as of the end of September, only 23.3% were individuals and that, despite having grown by 6,000 members this year, the total is less than 2024.
“What is the union for, just to get paid?” he stated. Workers from a cashier in a cafeteria in Santiago de Cuba. The note continued: “When asked why they do not join, many workers in the non-state sector throughout the country express, in addition to other arguments, criteria consistent with that of the young woman from Santiago. They do not find any attraction to be part of a union section that does not represent them as they aspire to.”
This is the opinion of a person who was never affiliated. That of those who had that experience and are cited in the official note is worse. “The precedent left a bad taste” and they do not want to “go through the same thing again,” he says. Workerswho agrees to protect their surnames “for what it may bring us as a consequence.”
“It seems to many of us that the union takes more from you than it gives you”
“It seems to many of us that the union takes more from you than it gives you,” confesses Juan, a shoemaker from Camagüey. “In his state stage he felt that it was an obligation to be unionized; now that he is the owner of the shoe store he complies with the payment of taxes and that’s it,” states the newspaper of the single union.
For his part, Paco, a butcher from Santiago de Cuba, remembers with Workers “moments of confrontation with arbitrary decisions by the administration”, in which the CTC, with which “it always fulfilled its duties”, never did anything for its rights. As an example, he gives having gone through illnesses without support or concern. “I better stay calm, fighting for what is mine, without belonging to anything,” he tells the newspaper.
The current unions also recognize the “challenge” of attracting individuals. Thus Leobanys Ávila Góngora, member of the Organizing Commission of the 22nd Congress, who warns that “the lack of representation fuels the dissatisfaction of the members and slows down the growth of the movement in the private sector.”
Workers It proposes to “recover the link between the union and the workers” by seeking an “agile response” to complaints, or by encouraging individuals by “inserting them into the CTC system of distinctions and decorations.” Furthermore, the newspaper sees “a breath” in the new Labor Codewhose draft bill is being discussed, until November 30, in the workplace.
However, in the new norm there is still no freedom of association: the Central de Trabajadores de Cuba continues to be the only legal union and its role is key for the grievance procedures, despite its known lack of interest in confronting state business management.
Although the authorities refer to the upcoming law as a profound reform, another of the main workers’ rights, the right to strike, will remain absent.
