The Central Committee of the Portuguese Communist Party salutes the Confederação Geral dos Trabalhadores Portugueses -–Intersindical Nacional [Trade Union Confederation of Portuguese Workers] on its 50th. anniversary, its governing bodies, leaders, shop stewards and activists and through them the workers and their struggle.
On October 1, 1970, a inter-trade union meeting was called, marking the creation of Intersindical, opening a new and important phase of the organisation and struggle of the working class and of all workers in Portugal.
Since its creation in 1970, Intersindical, heir and continuator of the best traditions of the workers' movement, which came to be named Confederação Geral dos Trabalhadores Portugueses - Intersindical Nacional following the Congress of all Trade Unions, in 1977, has had a continuous and remarkable intervention.
These are 50 years of intervention, against fascism, during the April Revolution, in defence of its achievements and resisting against the counter-revolutionary process, facing the attack on workers' rights in successive labour packages, namely with the Labour Code and its amendment for the worse, developing the fight against the SGP policy and the Aggression Pact of the troika, promoting the decisive struggle for the defence, restoration and achievement of rights in the new phase of national political life, despite the limitations of this political period, responding to the emergency trade union action in the face of the coronavirus epidemic and its use by big capital.
Nowadays, the impacts of capitalism which, due to its nature subjects workers to exploitation, continue and deepen, in an antagonistic contradiction between exploiters and exploited, which is expressed in a permanent class struggle. In Portugal, decades of right-wing policies with very clear class content are portrayed in low wages, precariousness, unregulated working hours, degraded working conditions, discrimination, violations of individual and collective rights, and the obstruction of trade union action in the workplaces, in repression, in the destruction of collective bargaining, in labour legislation to serve capital, namely the expiry of collective bargaining and the refusal of the principle of more favourable treatment for workers, are aspects that mark the reality of workers.
CGTP-IN, the great trade union central of the Portuguese workers, has unique characteristics that it enshrines in its declaration of principles and applies in its action gaining their trust. It is based on principles that affirm its class nature and its unitary, democratic, independent, solidary and mass base. It aggregates, in addition to the affiliated trade unions that formally constitute it, a group of others, giving expression to the trade union movement deeply rooted in the workers, capable of resisting and acting with the aim of defending workers' class interests and the process of social emancipation.
The situation of the workers in the face of capitalism whose structural crisis is worsening and whose exploitative nature does not change, in a country subject to the domination of big capital and the impositions of the European Union, is worrying. Big capital, while taking advantage of the PS government's class options in its favour, develops an intense action to promote revanchist and reactionary paths. The use of the epidemic and propaganda about scientific and technological development are associated in the immediate by presenting the oldest forms of exploitation as acceptable and modern.
Unity, organisation and struggle are the answer. Unity of workers on the basis of class interests, regardless of their political options or religious beliefs, which is built with the participation and mobilisation of workers and the fight against divisionism. Organisation, with the reinforcement of the CGTP-IN, of each trade union with the workers it represents, with a vision of the trade union movement as a whole, increasing unionisation and strengthening grass-roots trade union organisation. Struggle that associates workers' class interests with the objectives of a patriotic and left-wing alternative, an advanced democracy with the values of April in the future of Portugal, with the process of social emancipation, the construction of a classless society, with the revolutionary overcoming of capitalism, by socialism.
The 50 years of CGTP-IN mark a history and a path of an everlasting commitment to the workers and affirm the determination of a demanding intervention in the present, point to the future, in the struggle that continues, always with the workers, always for the workers.
Long live CGTP-IN
Long live the Portuguese workers
Long live the workers from all the countries of the world
