Street marches and rallies were held on Monday in major Moroccan cities on the occasion of May 1. Participants demanded that the authorities raise wages and lower prices for food and consumer goods, Maghreb Arabe Press reported.
Rallies were held in Rabat, Agadir, Casablanca, Marrakech, Meknes, Tangier, Fez and some other cities in the kingdom. They were initiated by the main trade unions in the country, including the General Union of Moroccan Workers, the Moroccan Labor Union, the Democratic Labor Confederation, and the National Labor Union of Morocco.
The main demands of the participants in the peaceful street marches and rallies were for higher wages, better purchasing power and the socio-economic situation of the working class. Labor activists from the National Labor Union of Morocco in a march in Rabat called on the government to "take immediate measures to limit prices, find a balance between imports and exports to curb inflation, and take urgent measures to preserve the food security of Moroccans."
One of the largest actions took place in Casablanca, the business, financial and commercial capital of Morocco. Speaking to the crowd, Miloudi Mouharik, secretary-general of the Moroccan Labor Union, noted that "celebrating May Day is not an ordinary holiday, but rather a protest, a call, a struggle and a show of resilience in the face of the ugliness of the wild neoliberal world economic system that is sucking wealth out of the people, against their vital interests."
"The Moroccan working class today faces a pandemic of a different kind, represented by rising prices and inflation, which have drained people's purchasing power. It is a crisis of the daily life of the citizen, the name of which is rising prices," Mouharik stressed.
Experts say that since last year Morocco has seen a significant increase in the price of basic food products.
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Based on materials from TASS