He is trying sabotage labor's main power, the power to strike. All the "little guys" throughout history--the people who do the work, who create the wealth--have mainly had this power alone, to prevent their own slavery: the power to walk off the job and shut down the enterprise. To say that you won't negotiate during a strike is to say that you do not recognize this long-established right of the powerless many against the moneyed few. Slave labor is the linchpin of "neo-liberalism" and "neo-liberal" globalization. Santos, of course, signed the U.S. (Obama)-Colombia "free trade for the rich" agreement, and is thereby obliged to deliver a further disempowered labor force, building upon the Bush Junta/Uribe decade (targeted assassination of thousands of labor leaders and other advocates of the poor).

Santos' statement on the planned strike further illuminates several other high profile policies of his--namely, his advocacy of legalizing illicit drugs and his peace talks with the FARC guerillas. I think we need to understand the pro-corporate motive of these policies, for instance, that legalizing, monopolizing and GMO-izing herbal, medicinal, recreational and/or addictive drugs has long been a plan of Big Pharma/Big Ag/Big Chem. Indeed, I suspect that the U.S./Bush Junta "war on drugs" was aimed at brutally driving FIVE MILLION peasant farmers from their lands, to steal the lands for Big Pharma/Big Ag/Big Chem and their local collaborators and subsidiaries, as well as eliminating rival gangs and "small players" in the drug trade. Big Pharma/Big Ag/Big Chem's big plan to produce and market the newly legalized drugs cannot proceed in the midst of a civil war (on-going for 50 to 70 years now). So they approve settling it, and this coincides with what may be a genuine (or partly genuine) 'good government' motive of Santos, to end it. Big Corp has gotten all they can from U.S. military billions, in dead labor leaders, arable land, etc.; now they want to cash in.