Thousands Protest Public Sector Layoffs in Puerto Rico

More than 100,000 turned out here Thursday for a protest against Puerto Rico Gov. Luis Fortuño’s decision to lay off 17,000 public employees, organizers said.
Police, however, declined to estimate the size of the crowd that converged on San Juan’s Plaza Las Americas, the biggest shopping mall in the Caribbean.
Speakers at the rally called on Fortuño to reconsider his austerity plan, which contemplates the elimination of as many as 30,000 jobs in the public sector amid 16.5 percent unemployment in the U.S. commonwealth.
Organized labor managed to shut down all state-owned enterprises and the island’s schools and colleges, while most private businesses remained open and ports and airports were functioning normally.
The president of the powerful SPT union, Roberto Pagan, told Efe that the one-day strike was mounted in response to the widespread economic harm done by the government layoffs.
Luis Pedraza Leduc, spokesman for the FASyL coalition of unions and grassroots groups that planned the protest, said that strike participation and turnout at rallies met organizers’ expectations.
He said FASyL would convene an indefinite general strike if the Fortuño administration did not abandon the plan for massive layoffs, a threat echoed by UGT union chief Juan Eliza Colon.
While Fortuño limited his comments on the protest to an appeal for calm, the head of his Cabinet, Marcos Rodriguez-Emma, said the government would stick to its policies and disputed organizers’ claims about the turnout.
“The space (in front of the mall) can be defined and if you want to look, it doesn’t hold more than 14,000 or 15,000 people,” he said.
Rodriguez-Emma went on to accuse the main opposition Popular Democratic Party, or PPD, of chartering 200 buses to bring people to the protest.
College students, civic groups and professional associations joined union workers for Thursday’s demonstration.
Puerto Rico is in the fourth year of a severe recession that has spurred a new wave of migration to the mainland United States. The government layoffs are part of an economic plan that sailed through the Puerto Rican legislature, where’s Fortuño pro-statehood New Progressive Party, or PNP, has big majorities in both houses.
Besides the layoffs, the program calls for a temporary hike in income taxes on corporations and affluent individuals, increased sales taxes on wine, beer and cigarettes and extensive outsourcing of government functions.