Portugal faces large-scale structural problems and growing and heightened inequality and injustice in the distribution of the wealth created.
A situation in which the lives of workers and large sectors of the population experience more difficulties while a handful of people concentrate profits like never before.
It cannot continue like this; the situation of workers and people and the future of the country demand a response.
A response and a policy that ensures sovereignty, development and improvement of living conditions, defence and reinforcement of public services, compliance with the Constitution that binds us all, the rights that it enshrines and that must be put into practice.
Day-to-day life reveals that the PS government, by choice, places itself at the service of the interests of economic groups and multinationals.
A path and a choice, also by PSD, CDS, Chega and IL, contrary to national interests and contrary to the rights, aspirations and needs of the workers and people.
And if it is so, what is required is a response, in terms of essential political options.
Enough of anti-social and anti-national policies, enough of submission to the interests of big capital.
The country does not need manoeuvres, propaganda and deceptions that always guarantee more profits for a few and exploitation for many.
What the country really needs is to respond to central development issues.
It needs to respond to the great national emergency facing us, the general and significant increase in wages.
The country of low wages cannot continue, we must move towards a general increase in wages for all workers, the valorisation of careers and professions, an increase of 15%, with a minimum of 150 euros for both the private sector and public administration, setting the National Minimum Wage at 910 euros on January 1st., reaching one thousand euros during the year 2024.
This is the path that is needed without manoeuvres and without hocus-pocus.
A path and a policy that demands an end to the attack on collective bargaining, namely through the expiry and limitation of the principle of more favourable treatment for workers.
A policy that opposes and confronts ongoing manoeuvres, setting aside propaganda and the public dimension they assume.
What they actually want is to avoid increasing wages and intensify the attack on workers' rights and on Social Security.
Manoeuvres to which the government not only provides coverage, but also supports and encourages.
The Confederation of Portuguese Industry (CIP) disclosed a so-called Social Pact, part of a huge propaganda operation.
An operation that, while portraying concern for workers, in fact aims to avoid increasing wages by maintaining the unacceptable situation of low wages.
CIP presents the “carrot” of the 15th. month salary, a deception and a mirage.
It puts forward false increases of 14.75%, in a complex scheme in which at the end of the day, the big companies always win.
But what does CIP actually want?
It wants the continuation of more public aids and to deepen a path that allows capital to pocket a larger part of the wealth created by workers and increase profits.
Beyond the talk and propaganda, what they want is to reduce the employer's contribution to Social Security, in other words ensure benefits for capital and serious losses for workers.
This is the time to remind that Social Security money belongs to workers, not to capital.
What CIP wants is to open the way to steam roll pensions and their value, to open the door to dismantle Social Security, to put labour money at the service of pension funds, of financial capital, to gamble the future of workers in the casino of speculation.
In the fine print of the pompous words, what CIP aims is to further weaken the rights of workers with regard to protection in maternity and paternity, illness and unemployment, and to further encourage the deregulation of working hours and their extension.
It wants a State without resources to invest in public services, in the NHS, in Public Schools, in the development of the Country.
This path has already proven and proves every day that it does not serve the workers, it does not serve the people, it does not serve the country.
Enough talk. There is money, and this has been clearly stated by the employers, so increase wages.
The cost of workers for companies, on average, does not even reach 20%.
For micro, small and medium-sized companies, such an increase is essential to boost economic activity.
The idea that wages do not increase because of productivity is false.
For almost two decades, productivity in Portugal has risen more than real wages and above the European Union average.
Enough talk and don't make excuses, deceptions and false promises.
This is yet another moment of clarification. The government must reject the employer's objectives and purposes and not, as it has done so far, incorporate them into its action.
From what is already known, the signs are not positive, firstly due to the maintenance of the grievous norms of labour legislation, but also due to pointing increases of just 2% in Public Administration.
The government is not off to a good start on this issue right from the start when we are witnessing the brutal degradation of purchasing power in practically all sectors and strata, with particular emphasis on retirees and pensioners, for whom an increase in pensions of at least 7.5 % is required, with a minimum of 70 euros.
The country's situation every day also expresses great fiscal injustice, with too few taxes for capital and too many taxes for workers, retirees and pensioners, micro, small and medium-sized entrepreneurs.
The employers’ confederations and their political representatives want to further deepen this fiscal injustice.
This has to end; the PCP defends a policy of fiscal justice with less taxes on those who work or have worked their entire lives and more taxes on big capital.
We face a very serious problem of access to housing, a problem that requires urgent measures with immediate effects on the lives of those who live and work here.
At a time when thousands of families are facing rising rents and loan payments, the risk of eviction or the desperate inevitability of having to hand over their homes, after successive deprivations on a personal level, what is necessary is to protect housing and stop seizures and evictions, impose a maximum limit of 0.43% increase on all rents next year, make the banks, with their millions of profits at our cost, assume the increase in interest rates.
Nothing justifies maintaining tax benefits for banks and real estate funds, those truly responsible and simultaneously beneficiaries of the current situation
And speaking of those responsible and simultaneously beneficiaries, there we have the privatisations.
If privatisations were a solution, Portugal would be one of the most developed countries in the world, such has been the privatisation fever with successive PS and PSD governments competing to see who privatises more.
One by one, strategic companies were privatised with the consequences that are there to see.
A disastrous path for the country that the PS government wants to deepen through the privatisation of TAP, one of the most important national companies, guarantor of sovereignty, an instrument of economic development that they now want to offer to a foreign multinational.
There is no political, economic or strategic reason to hand over TAP to foreigners.
The privatisation of TAP is therefore yet another political crime, yet another economic crime that is underway.
It is necessary to stop the privatisation, it is necessary and possible to save TAP, its workers and the national interest.
Assume national interests before Brussels and strengthen the productive apparatus, guarantee strategic sectors by keeping them in the public sphere. It is possible, it is necessary to get the country to produce.
That is what is needed, a strong stimulus to national production, development and sovereignty.
Portugal has the means, resources, has people, professionals, capabilities, will and strength to set out on the path to improving living conditions, development and social progress.
The ongoing struggle of workers, populations and broad layers of society constitutes a determining factor of hope for the materialisation of this necessary path.
