The Socialist Equality Party (SEP) and the Collective of Workers Action Committees (CWAC) in Sri Lanka are holding an online public meeting on Saturday, October 4 at 7:00 p.m. We call on workers and youth to attend and discuss the program and action required to stop the restructuring of the Ceylon Electricity Board (CEB) and to defend employees’ rights.
On September 21, President Anura Kumara Dissanayake imposed essential service orders banning CEB employees from intensifying their four-week work-to-rule and two-day sick leave campaign against the restructuring of this vital state-owned enterprise.
The Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna/National People’s Power (JVP/NPP) government began restructuring the CEB in early September as part of its International Monetary Fund (IMF)-dictated program. It plans to break up the CEB into four government-owned companies, paving the way for their eventual privatisation and threatening workers’ jobs, wages and previously won working conditions and rights. The trade unions have called protests to quell workers’ opposition and presented 12 demands. CEB management and the government have rejected these demands.
The CEB workers’ fight to defend their rights has become a focal point in the struggle to defeat the Dissanayake government’s IMF program. The JVP/NPP regime wants to suppress the resistance of electricity workers in order to intensify the restructuring and then privatise hundreds of other state-owned enterprises (SOEs), destroying the jobs, wages and other rights of workers in those institutions.
All the trade union bureaucracies, which fully support IMF austerity, are responsible for putting the CEB on the restructuring chopping block. The JVP-led trade union leaders are openly scabbing against CEB workers’ resistance, cynically denouncing it as a “conspiracy” by the opposition parliamentary parties.
But the opposition parties—the United National Party, Samagi Jana Balawegaya, Sri Lanka Freedom Party, Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna and Tamil and Muslim groups including Ilankai Tamil Arasu Kachchi—fully support the IMF program. Protests called by several of the opposition-controlled trade unions are not aimed at mobilising workers against the government’s restructuring, but at dissipating their anger.
While CEB workers have demonstrated their determination to fight, militancy alone will not defeat the government attacks. Workers must unify with their class brothers and sisters in other SOEs and private sector companies, whose lives have been devastated by Colombo’s austerity measures.
The SEP has called on workers to reject the political manoeuvres and betrayals of the trade union bureaucracies by taking the struggle into their own hands, through the building of independent action committees and fighting IMF austerity with an international socialist program. We call on all workers and young people to attend our Zoom meeting this Saturday and discuss these vital questions.
Meeting date and time: Saturday, October 4, 7:00 p.m.
Please register and join the meeting here:
https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/BEO9NOTVTwq6E6ft7gP8Yg