Coronavirus: Myanmar Workers Demand Factory Closures Paid Leave.

Richard Mellor
FFWP Editor

Just a short clip of women workers protesting in Myanmar (Burma).  They want the bosses to shut down the factory for a month and pay them. My guess is that there's a good chance some of these factories and maybe this one make products for western apparel and clothing companies. This is the case in Cambodia, Vietnam and Bangladesh.

We will be seeing much more of this action by workers throughout the world in the coming months. In addition, in more and more countries the capitalist class will be resorting to more oppressive measures not simply to maintain social control but to expand it. We are seeing these measures creeping in in various countries. Here in the US the heads of organized labor, with 14 million members are pretty much silent bar a couple of exceptions but as a unified force we hear nothing. The AFL-CIO leadership has issued a statement on its web page with basic demands pointing to the failure of the system to provide basic sick leave and other important rights, things they have refused to seriously fight for for decades.

But any righteous anger, attacks on the system, capitalism and the politicians of the two parties, Democratic and Republican that are responsible for the present situation and the health crisis that has caused it are completely absent from the mass media.  So discredited is the leadership of organized labor that the average worker would not consider for one minute to visit the AFL-CIO webpage. Many do not even know what AFL-CIO stands for*

*The AFL-CIO is the acronym for the nation's main and largest national labor federation. It stands for American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations.