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May 25th, 2017 
Awake Goy 
nsnbc : Hundreds of thousands of state employees in Colombia stopped working and hit the streets in all major cities on Thursday. The state employees strike due to the failure of the administration of President Juan manuel Santos to implement agreements reached during previous strikes. Moreover, the labor unions CUT, CGT, and CTC also joined the strike and rallies to express their solidarity with the western province of Choco and the city’s largest port city Buenaventura where citizens have been on strike for a week, demanding an end to chronic state neglect.
The labor unions reported that more than 600,000 teachers, prison guards, workers from offices of prosecutors as well as other state workers who “were fed up” with the Santos administration’s broken promises that led them to call of previous strikes had joined the strikes and hit the streets to express their disappointment, outrage and their demands.
The Santos administration, for its part, is between a rock and a hard place. Even if the administration would like to fulfill man of the demands, it has serious difficulties doing so without risking a cascading inflation that would further weaken the country’s economy. Decades of mismanagement, corruption, nepotism, tax evasion by corporations and the ultra rich as well as neglect have severely weakened the resilience of Colombia’s economy.
The situation went from bad to worse in 2014 when global oil prices slumped. Oil export is Colombia’s primary source of foreign reserves. Even though oil prices are slowly recovering, the treasury is empty.
State workers and minorities are becoming increasingly impatient and determined to get the public investments and wage hikes they were promised but never received. The protesters are angry also over the government’s apparent inability to even start or maintain negotiations. According to the CUT, Colombia’s largest labor union, Labor Minister Griselda Restrepo announced renewed talks with teachers last week, but hasn’t been heard of since.
The strike caused the closure of schools, prohibiting millions of children from attending school while teachers insist that they are fed up by the country’s failure to invest in the country’s failing education system. One repercussion of the strike is that millions of parents are unable to work because they have to look after their children – and maybe join teachers in their rallies.
A/N – nsnbc 20.05.2017
Source Article from https://nsnbc.me/2017/05/24/hundreds-of-thousands-of-colombians-hit-the-streets-in-new-rallies-organized-by-labor-unions/
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