The blossoms are starting to bud; spring is on the horizon. Uruguayan president José Mujica has entered his 6th month, and legislators are wrangling over the five-year budget. This is strike season. ¡Paro!
There are occasional strikes here anyway, mostly of the transit kind, and mostly in response to violence — such as when rowdy soccer fans roughed up about thirty buses after the national soccer championships. August, however, saw the implementation of strikes across the public sector to influence the allocation of the national budget: health workers, teachers, and even state bureaucrats raised their signs. Not everyone is the biggest fan of this – it’s inconvenient to be sure – but they knew it was coming and they are dealing.
Some American English teachers I know here are also a bit dismayed, as some of them work at the IPA, a teacher-training institute which has been occupied by the students for several weeks now. The students are lobbying to have the education budget increased to 6% of the GDP. With the occupation rumored to continue into September and the U.S. teachers’ contracts ending in November, that doesn’t leave them much time to do what they imagined coming here to do. The strikes do, however, provide didactic lessons of a different sort. How important it is to check the news, before you find yourself waiting at a bus stop forever. How to resign yourself to the gap between your plans and hopes and those of co-workers with a much longer time horizon. How to fill suddenly empty days. How institutionalized strikes here are a form of redress.
I don’t know much about labor movements back home in the United States, but mention strikes and I come up with: the baseball strike. The Hollywood writers strike. The hockey lockout. All entertainment based. Good things did come out of them for the benefit of the nation: Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog comes to mind, and the boost Sonia Sotomayor’s Supreme Court bid got from her reputation as “baseball’s savior.” But I don’t really watch sports or T.V. I do use public transportation, as did the millions affected by the New York Transit Strike of 2005, which is probably why it got resolved a lot more quickly. I’m sure I’ve forgotten other strikes.
I don’t have the statistics on how influential the strikes here in Uruguay are, and I imagine at some point their predictability undermines their efficiency. But I do find it interesting how something so overtly part of the political landscape here occupies such a sporadic place in the U.S. these days – or at least, because of the size of the U.S. and the smaller likelihood of stumbling over a massive rally on your walk home, it feels that way.
Flora Lindsay-Herrera is currently a Fulbright Fellow in Montevideo, Uruguay. For more about her experiences, check out her blog. For more on politics in Latin America, check out “Loaded Questions on Wheels: Politics and God,” “Coming to the U.S. Sin Papeles,” “Day in the Life: Elections in a Foreign Land,” “An Avalanche of Human Rights for Same-Sex Couples,” and “Can English Really Open Doors?”
