In Venezuela, Shootings of Union Organizers Common

By Humberto Márquez, IPS News. Posted May 18, 2009.

In January, in the eastern state of Anzoátegui, governed by Tarek Saab of the PSUV, police fired upon picketing workers who were occupying a Mitsubishi assembly plant. Two workers were killed.

"Two workers dead. That is a blow I feel deep down in my heart," President Chávez said on that occasion. "Those responsible must be sent to prison."

Orlando Chirino, the head of C-CURA, retorted that "it is not enough to make speeches promising thorough investigations and severe punishment for those responsible. What has happened is a systemic problem of workers being targeted in violent attacks, not just an isolated incident of excessive force by police."

"What's happening in some Venezuelan labour sectors is basically a result of the chaos that followed the near-dissolution of political parties," Francisco Iturraspe, head of the department of Labour Law at the Central University and a leading figure in the Latin American Association of Labour Lawyers, told IPS.

Ever since the 1930s, when political parties and trade unions were organised, "the parties, especially the social democratic Acción Democrática (AD), exercised discipline over the labour movement through its union bureaux, but this collapsed when the parties unravelled during the past decade," according to Iturraspe.

He quoted Enrique Tejera París, foreign minister in the second government of former President Carlos Andrés Pérez (1974-1979 and 1989-1993), as saying that "without the tutelage of AD, trade unions in Venezuela would start a war over access to their share of oil revenues."

But the PSUV "has no apparatus to control the workers' movement, which has been of secondary importance in its strategy of power, and this can be seen in the different currents vying for control of the UNT, multiplying the number of unions to the point that in Ciudad Guayana there are nearly a dozen pro-government unions in the construction industry," Iturraspe said.

William Lizardo, secretary of the Federation of Construction Workers, said "the Labour Ministry is responsible, because it permitted and encouraged the creation of unions headed by people who are criminals or have been dismissed from companies for wrongdoing, in a bid to displace the traditional unions."

He said there were 24 unions in the construction industry in 2002, one for each region of the country, but now there are 150 unions, "each vying for their members to be allocated jobs on some construction site."

"This is very clear in Ciudad Guayana, where unemployment is twice the official national figure (of 7.3 percent in March 2009), and thousands of workers gather at the gates seeking work. They fall prey to unscrupulous mafias operating under the cover of the profusion of unions," Víctor Moreno, president of the regional union federation, told IPS.

Meanwhile, Labour Minister María Cristina Iglesias said "when we entered government (in 1999) there were approximately 1,300 unions. Now we have close to 6,000. This means we are a country where there is trade union freedom.

"Never have there been so many union organisations, and never have they been listened to as they are now.

"These organisations are maturing, trying to build a different reality, which involves demands for better wages and conditions, and also means making the political leap toward having a say in the management of companies and making decisions about production. In other words, it means taking on their role as the working class in the building of socialism," the minister said.

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