No Labor Harmony on May Day in Nicaragua

Sandinista and dissident union activists denounced each other at separate May Day rallies Sunday as 28 construction workers entered the second week of a fast that has raised the level of labor unrest in Managua.

The construction workers, camped in a union hall, are taking only liquids to protest the government’s dismissal of 4,000 members of their union for a two-month-old strike. The Labor Ministry has declared the strike illegal and refused to meet with its leaders.

Since Friday, Sandinista police have cordoned off the hall to break up gatherings by the workers’ supporters and keep out anyone except Red Cross medical personnel. As many as 60 demonstrators have been arrested outside the hall, and telephones and water taps have been shut off.

The dispute echoed through speeches by President Daniel Ortega and opposition union leaders Sunday as they addressed International Labor Day rallies with some of the harshest words ever hurled at each other in public.

Carlos Salgado, president of the Moscow-line socialist labor federation that represents the construction workers, called the Sandinista revolutionary leadership “a clique of petty bourgeoisie . . . ambitious, bullying and corrupt.”

Antonio Jarquin, a centrist union leader, told 2,500 people at the opposition rally that the Sandinistas were “bank robbers” who fought their way to power nine years ago and then turned into “cowards” who treat labor unrest with “fascist repression.”

Speaking to 5,000 people across town, Ortega called the dissident labor leaders “pseudo-revolutionaries who are playing a sad role as agents of imperialism.” The Reagan Administration, he charged, is paying them to create unrest to weaken the government’s hand in peace talks with the U.S.-backed Contras.

Several thousand construction workers, auto mechanics and restaurant workers went on strike after the government in February introduced a new currency and a new pay scale that sharply cut the buying power of wages. Building tradesmen now earn the equivalent of 40 cents per day.

Ortega said the austerity measures are necessary shock treatment for an economy battered by the Contra war and a U.S. economic embargo.

At the opposition rally, Salgado said that last week, as the Contras arrived for three days of peace talks, a senior police official visited the union hall to warn the strikers to stop “playing into the hands of the counterrevolutionaries.”

“They’re telling the workers to forget our demands, to defend the revolution first,” Salgado said. “But I ask them, what is the revolution without the workers? It is simply a bureaucratic and militaristic hulk that commits the worst outrages against the people to preserve its power.”