Now, the government of the country is targeting the workers that participate in the protests, massively firing them and threatening them with other forms of violence.

Juan Somavia, Director General of the International Labor Organization (ILO), said he had expressed his concerns to the authorities of Bahrain with reference to the discrimination against leaders and members of the General Federation of Bahrain Trade Unions (GFBTU) and urged the government to respect the rights of workers.

Somavia’s statements were connected to the denunciations made by the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC), that represents millions of workers around the world and that recently denounced the abuses against workers who participate in the demonstrations against the regime. ITUC denounced that these workers are replaced by people who don’t participate in the strikes, and sometimes with migrants who are extremely vulnerable.

“The international trade union movement is extremely concerned at the large number of workers, including trade union representatives, who are being heavily penalised by the authorities simply because they exercised their legitimate rights to strike and to freedom of expression and assembly, following the widely-supported call for strike action by the national trade union centre GFBTU,” said ITUC General Secretary Sharan Burrow in a press release issued by the federation. “These dismissals are nothing less than a “political purification” in workplaces. This is totally unacceptable and illegal”, added Burrow.

According to ITUC, around 300 workers have been dismissed for taking part in the strike and in demonstrations, mainly from the aluminium company Alba (Aluminium Bahrain BSC) and the Khalifa Sea Port (driven by APM terminal).
Furthermore, the aluminium company Alba has announced that it will “make its rules and procedures even tougher, notably through action in the courts against striking workers.”

Other companies are also planning to bring union leaders to court for having “called on workers to take part in the general strike”. The repression is also exerted in the context of the university, where teachers’ representatives were arrested and the payment of salaries of certain lecturers was stopped. “Students supported by scholarships who participated in demonstrations have been punished by non-renewal of their scholarships”, denounced the ITUC.

Finally, the ITUC denounced the dismissals as “an economic massacre following the deplorable human massacre of the past few weeks”.

Photo: http://cibernoticiasexpress.wordpress.com