Uruguay:  Support grows for CP unionist in presidential elections

The Communist Party of Uruguay is supporting, once more, party member and labor leader Oscar Andrade in next year’s October presidential elections, as the candidate of the leftist Broad Front (Frente Amplio) to which the Communist Party belongs along with twelve other parties. Andrade is currently Secretary General of SUNCA, the United National Union of Construction and Allied Workers. He served in the Uruguayan Congress from 2014 to 2016.

In its statement of nomination of Andrade, the Communist Party emphasized the danger of rising fascist movements in Latin America and worldwide, as exemplified by the Trump administration and the election of Jair Bolsonaro as president of Uruguay’s outsize neighbor, Brazil.

 

Japan:  CP defends rights of foreign workers

The Japanese Communist Party has joined other communists and leftists around the world in demanding fair treatment for foreign workers in their country. Japan is a country with relatively very few foreign-born residents, but recently the government of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has been sponsoring legislation in the Diet (parliament) that would allow a limited number of what elsewhere are called “guest workers” into the country, in this case as “trainees”.  On October 30, communist members of the Diet met with the Japan Federation of Lawyers to discuss the proposed legislation and reach agreement on a common approach.

The communists agreed with the position taken by attorney Ichikawa Masahi that the government’s bill was unsatisfactory in that it did not guarantee the basic rights of the foreign workers.  Among other problems, foreign workers allowed into Japan under the bill will not be allowed, for ten years, to bring in their families. Japanese Communist Party parliamentarian Shiokawa Tetsuya pointed out that the bill does not protect the right of foreign trainees to change jobs when they are in Japan; nor does it do anything about the role of exploitative job brokers.

 

Spain:  Scare tactics used to bolster Saudi arms sales

Spanish Communists are calling out the governing parties’ for having prioritized the Spanish armaments industry’s profits from sales to the military of Saudi Arabia over vital human rights concerns.

Enrique Santiago, Secretary General of the Communist Party of Spain, and Ernesto Alba, Secretary General of the Communist Party of the southern region of Andalusia, met with leaders of the CCOO, or Confederation of Workers’ Commissions, which is the largest union  confederation in Spain and representatives of the state owned Navantia shipbuilding company in Cadiz. The two communist leaders toured the shipyards and talked to workers about the situation in these facilities, in which currently building warships for the Saudis, whose repressive regime is currently carrying out a brutal military intervention in Yemen.  They denounced previous governments of the Socialist Workers’ Party and the People’s Party for having neglected the shipbuilding industry, but stated that human rights considerations had to take priority and decried the use of the threat of unemployment as hunger to bolster the case for selling arms to the Saudis.

Iraq: Strengthened protection of oil resources

Raid Fahmi, the Secretary of the Central Committee of the Iraqi Communist Party and a member of the country’s parliament, has criticized the country’s current law on the functioning of the Iraqi National Oil Company.

Fahmi expressed the Communist Party’s view that as written and approved, Law Number 4, passed earlier this year, is far from adequate in protecting this vital national resource for the Iraqi people.  Among other things, there are insufficient guarantees against harmful privatization efforts. There is a lawsuit in the Iraqi Federal Court concerning these deficiencies.

 

Comments