The government of Keiko Fujimori has asked Congress to delegate extraordinary legislative powers, the mechanism by which the executive can legislate by decree without parliamentary debate.
A recent forum convened September 3 by Senator Jaime Quito and the first vice president of the Chamber of Deputies, Analí Márquez Huanca, brought together trade union officials and self-styled “left ideologues” to reject the request. Both legislators belong to the left nationalist Together for Peru (JP) party, and Márquez was JP candidate Roberto Sánchez’s running mate in the last elections.
Those attending warned that, if the request advances, it will unleash a new wave of labor precarity (characterized by unstable employment, low pay, minimal, if any, social protections and poor working conditions) comparable to the “flexibilization” of the 1990s, further impoverishing workers and eroding already weakened unions. The unanimous conclusion was total rejection of the request and a call for a “united resistance” in the streets.
The warning about the content of the request is correct. However, workers must be forewarned that this language of unity conceals that neither the parliamentarians who convened the forum nor the trade union bureaucracy participating represents a way forward against Fujimori’s policies.
Their objective function is not to defeat the government’s offensive but to channel working class opposition into the institutional framework of the capitalist state, precisely at the moment when the ruling class is preparing to unload the weight of the crisis onto the workers.
The request is no isolated event
The demand for legislative powers represents the direct implementation of the program Fujimori announced on July 28 in her inauguration address. There she declared two “fronts of national emergency” and announced that she would resort to “extraordinary resources,” emergency decrees and extraordinary powers delegated by Congress. The real political core of that speech—as the World Socialist Web Site noted at the time—was the concentration of executive power outside all parliamentary control and the intensification of repression against the working class. The current request is the first concrete step in that concentration.
It forms part of a broader offensive by the Peruvian financial oligarchy and US imperialism to deepen the exploitation of the working class and transfer still more wealth to the economic power groups. Keiko Fujimori, direct representative of the interests of big capital and of the military apparatus that sustained her father Alberto Fujimori’s dictatorship, seeks to consolidate a regime of labor precarity allowing companies to maximize profits at the expense of wages, working conditions and the democratic rights of workers.
In that same inauguration speech, Fujimori stated the terms of the operation openly: “We want better wages, but also sustainable companies and more formal jobs.”
Translated from the bourgeois idiom, this means: we want workers to accept crumbs while capital maintains its rate of profit. The increase in the monthly minimum wage to 1,300 soles ($388) that she announced falls far below the basic family basket of 1,848 soles ($551), while informal employment accounts for more than 72 percent of the Peruvian workforce, with average earnings in small enterprises of 858 soles ($256) a month.
The “flexibilization” of the 1990s, implemented under the original Fujimorismo with the backing of the IMF and the World Bank, destroyed millions of stable jobs and plunged the Peruvian working class into informality and misery. Its legal framework—the 1993 Constitution, imposed by the dictatorship and never substantially modified by any subsequent government—remains in force. The new offensive seeks to complete that work, eliminating the few labor rights that survive.
The class trajectory of the conveners
Senator Jaime Quito Sarmiento is a lawyer and politician from Arequipa whose career has unfolded entirely within the state apparatus and the establishment parties. Initially elected as a congressman for Free Peru in 2021, riding the coattails of then President Pedro Castillo, he now belongs to Together for Peru. His political career has had no organic connection whatsoever to the workers’ movement.
Analí Márquez Huanca, deputy for Cusco, has a similar trajectory: administrative posts in local governments in Cusco and Lima, and a career within the public administration of the state.
Neither of these parliamentarians have a socialist program or any record of struggle alongside the workers. Their initiative in convening a forum “in defense of labor rights” seeks only to pretend to speak for workers, while subordinating any mobilization to the interests of the bourgeois nationalist parties they represent.
That orientation is not a matter merely of individual biographies. Together for Peru is the party of Roberto Sánchez, minister throughout Castillo’s government and presidential candidate in 2026, whose campaign repeated point by point Castillo’s anticipatory capitulation—the ratification of the right-winger Julio Velarde at the head of the Central Bank, the promise to be “neither a communist nor a statist”—and whose defeat handed the presidency to Keiko Fujimori.
Free Peru brought Castillo to power in 2021 on a wave of rural and working-class revolt. Four days into his government, he sent his prime minister to put down a peasant strike against the Las Bambas mining company. Eventually, the repression left 16 wounded by police gunfire. These are the parties now offering themselves as the leadership of the “united resistance.”
The trade union bureaucracy: transmission belt of the capitalist state
The union federation has stated its position formally. At the September 3 forum in Congress, titled “Anti-Labor Package,” the keynote speaker was Gustavo Minaya, deputy general secretary of the General Confederation of Workers of Peru (CGTP), who argued that labor formalization cannot be built by reducing rights and proposed that the request be rejected by the Chamber of Deputies.
The CGTP closed by calling for the unity of the working class in defense of the labor rights already won. It is worth pausing on what this means in practice. Confronted with a government demanding powers to legislate by decree, the only measure the CGTP leadership proposes is that deputies vote against it—an appeal to the very Chamber where Fujimorism and its allies hold the majority, and which approved, weeks before the election, the law transferring crimes committed by police and military personnel to military tribunals.
No industrial action is called for, no strike, no organization of workers in the workplaces. The call for “the unity of the working class” is left without content: it is unity behind a parliamentary maneuver.
The same union bureaucracy has repeatedly demonstrated its function of containing the class struggle. In Peru, as throughout the world, the union leaderships have been absorbed into the capitalist state and act as a transmission belt for the interests of the oligarchy and imperialism.
These leaderships negotiate contracts that set the price of labor power within the capitalist framework, guaranteeing labor discipline and the extraction of surplus value. Their objective function is to keep exploitation within limits “acceptable” to the system, not to defend the interests of workers. When pressure from the rank and file becomes uncontrollable, these leaderships channel the discontent into dead ends: symbolic marches, empty declarations and treacherous agreements with the government and the employers.
The most recent and bloodiest proof is the popular uprising of December 2022 to March 2023, when broad masses of workers and peasants—above all in the southern Andes—took to the streets against the regime of Dina Boluarte and were answered with at least 70 protesters killed by the police and the Armed Forces. Far from calling for an industrial action that could have paralyzed the country, the trade union bureaucracy diverted the movement toward the demand for “early elections” and a constituent assembly—that is, back toward the same state apparatus that was ordering the massacre. That apparatus prepared and delivered the conditions for the return of Fujimorism to the executive.
The Peruvian trade union bureaucracy, which out of opportunist interests joins Free Peru and Together for Peru in such a forum, has no perspective of waging a serious struggle against capitalism or the assault on labor rights. Its “unity” with the bourgeois nationalist parliamentarians is nothing more than a maneuver to administer the crisis of the trade union movement and prevent workers from developing a revolutionary socialist consciousness.
In order to wage a genuine struggle against Fujimori, Peruvian workers need to create rank-and-file committees in the workplaces, democratically elected and recallable at any moment. These committees must organize the fight against precarity, layoffs and wage attacks, breaking with the discipline imposed by the trade union bureaucracy and coordinate nationally and across sectors—mining, industry, transport, education, health—around clear demands: a minimum wage indexed to the real cost of the family basket, an effective eight-hour day, the prohibition of temporary contracts and the right to organize without reprisals.
This struggle cannot halt at national borders. The same mining and financial conglomerates that exploit Peruvian workers exploit workers in Chile, Brazil, Mexico and the United States, and the Chancay megaport has turned Peru into a battlefield of the rivalry between US imperialism and China. That is why the rank-and-file committees must link up with the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC), founded by the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI), to unify the struggles of workers on a world scale.
The fight against the Fujimori government’s offensive cannot be confined to defending labor rights within capitalism. The only way out is the expropriation of the Peruvian financial oligarchy—the 17 family clans that have accumulated US$35 billion—and of the multinational corporations that exploit the country’s resources, the socialist planning of the economy and the redistribution of wealth under workers’ control. This requires an internationalist perspective: the Peruvian working class is part of the global struggle against capitalism and imperialism, and its emancipation is bound to the victory of socialism on a world scale.
Above all, the Peruvian working class needs its own revolutionary party, independent of the bourgeoisie and of every variant of petty-bourgeois nationalism: a section of the International Committee of the Fourth International.
The World Socialist Web Site calls on Peruvian workers to break with the trade union bureaucracy and the capitalist parties, to build independent rank-and-file committees and to orient themselves toward a revolutionary socialist program. Only in this way will they defeat Keiko Fujimori’s offensive and open the road to a society without exploitation or oppression.