Jamaica strike

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spreadsThe str ike wave in opposition to Prime Minister Manley's 15% wage ceiling continues unabated in Jamaica.

The strikes have spread from factories and ports to banking and insurance. The pay limit was imposed last year as part of the cost the working class would have to pay for a $240 million IMF loan to shore up the ailing Jamaican economy.

Other austerity measures included a massive devaluation of the Jamaican dollar and swingeing price increases on basic items.

Power and sugar workers are also threatening strike action in pursuit of their own claims while waterfront workers walked out after the employers failed to pay a $10 a week travel allowance awarded by the Industrial Disputes Tribunal.

Soldiers

Jamaican Defence Force soldiers were sent in to unload flour and local currency fresh from the mint from two ships at Port Bustamante in Kingston.

The use of troops as a scab force can only tarnish still further the left' posturing of Manley's PNP government.

The need for a Trotskyist party with a programme to mobilise the Jamaican working class for socialism is now urgently posed if the pro-imperialist Jamaica Labour Party is not to capitalise on the betrayals of Manley at the next election. which the former leader Manuel Fraga has now resigned).

In the working class areas there are also lists presented by the left wing parties which stood candidates in the elections -these include the centrist Communist Movement (MC), the two Maoist' parties (ORT and PTE), who are this time presenting joint candidates (in 1250 municipalities) and have declared themselves on the point of unification, and the "Trotskyist" LCR, Spanish section of the "United" Secretariat of the Fourth International.

The LCR's campaign is disfigured with same confusions which characterised their general election campaign.

They seem happy to describe the main workers' parties (PSOE and CP) as part of the left and proposed united candidacies lists with them on the vaguest possible reformist political basis.

Nonetheless an editorial in the latest issue of their paper Combate argues that "this vote for which the PSOE and CP are asking remains 'completely useless' in beating the UCD in the municipal elections."

• Insofar as this remark refers to the electoral division between the PSOE and CP, which divides the working class on no principled basis and helps the UCD to power, it contains an element of truth.

PSOE leader Gonzalez