Targets of a violent offensive against labor and social rights, the working class and the workers resisted and fought, with determination and confidence, in defense of their rights and interests and for the defeat of the PSD/CDS-PP government and the right wing policies, imposed upon the Portuguese over the last 40 years and exponentially aggravated during the last legislature.
A policy that stole wages and pensions, vacations and holidays, attacked collective contracting, increased and deregulated work schedules, fomented precariousness, destroyed the national productive sector and hundreds of thousands of jobs, cut family subsidies, unemployment and sickness subsidies, the minimum wage and other social benefits, imposed brutal taxation upon work incomes while alleviating those upon big capital, that degraded, closed and hindered the access to essential public services, to the social functions of the State, in health, education, social security, to culture and justice. affronted the Constitution, made the country poorer and more dependent.
It was the struggle of the working class and workers – with the important role of the broad trade-union movement, CGTP-IN – the great trade-union confederation of Portuguese workers –expressed in innumerable actions of struggle, built by unity in action, from the workplaces, that stimulated other sectors and sections of the populations to struggle and participate in grand and combative mass actions. Examples include: the commemorations of April 25th and May 1st; the General Strike of June 27th 2013; the «March for Abril» on the bridges of the rivers Tagus and Douro, in Lisbon and Oporto; or the concentration of November 10th 2015, in front of the National Parliament, that affirmed the defeat and removal of the PSD/CDS-PP government.
Motor of the mass struggle and social transformation, the struggle of the working class and workers contributed decisively towards the defeat of the PSD/CDS-PP government and towards opening a path for a new stage of the national political life.
A struggle that, with the indispensable and irreplaceable initiative and contribution of PCP permitted the achievement, since then, of important advances in the defense, recovery and conquest of rights, namely: restoration of wages and the 35 hour workweek, increase in meal subsidies and fight against precariousness among Public Administration workers; the recovery of collective contracts in the State-Owned Company Sector; restitution of the stolen holidays; increasing unemployment benefits; end of the overtax and widening the IRS reduction from education expenses; increase in the national minimum wage; restitution of the pension complements and reversion of the privatization of public terrestrial passenger transportation companies; free school books; increase and extension of the attribution of family subsidies, general and extraordinary increase in pensions, among other measures of social reach.
But it is possible and necessary to go further: with the reinforcement of the integrated struggle, unionization, organization at the base and unity of action, and the intensification and widening of the organized action of workers and the masses – in which communist militant play a decisive role. With the struggle of workers and the masses and the initiative of PCP, it is possible and necessary to continue and deepen the path of defense, recovery and conquest of the rights of the workers and people, increase wages including the national minimum wage, end the expiration of collective contracting, restore the principle of most favorable treatment and repeal other grave norms of the Labor Code and the General Work Law in Public Administration, defend employment with rights and fight precariousness, implement a fiscal policy that relieve work incomes and taxes big capital, energize national production and investment, promotes economic growth and a more just distribution of wealth, breaks with foreign constraints and breaks with blackmails, and recovers sovereignty.
Bearing confidence and future, the 20th Congress of PCP salutes all workers and manifests its support to the struggle they engage in defense of rights and for the improvement of living and working conditions, with the conviction that is the path that, in convergence with other anti-monopolist sectors, the necessary and irreplaceable action of PCP, and the intervention of other democrats and patriots will lead to a rupture with the right-wing policies and pave the way for an alternative patriotic and left-wing policy. That this is the path towards achieving the advanced democracy with the values of April in the future of Portugal and the society free from the exploitation of man by man that corresponds to the great objective of emancipation of workers.
Long live the worker!
Long live the 20th Congress!
Long live the Portuguese Communist Party!