A-Infos (en) The Bolivarian Government Against Union Autonomy

 From the Iberian Anarchist Federation's Tierra y Libertad website, an article describing 
and criticizing the government of Hugo Chávez and its attempts to co-opt the Venezuelan 
labor movement. ---- Orlando Chirino, a revolutionary Venezuelan labor leader, has 
recently denounced the Bolivarian government as "anti-worker and anti-union." It would be 
difficult to accuse Chirino of being a "golpista" [1] or an "ally of imperialism." In the 
year 2002 he condemned the coup, mobilizing to defend the state oil industry from the work 
stoppage driven by management leadership. In each occasion presented him, he supported and 
accompanied workers' attempts to control factories closed by their bosses. He is rooted 
among the workers and was made a leader in the Unión Nacional de Trabajadores (UNT), the 
labor union promoted by his own president Chávez.

If Orlando has been part of the so-called Bolivarian movement for many years, what has 
happened in 2009 to get him to make these kinds of statements about the government he once 
defended? The main part of the answer is: because Chirino is an iron defender of the 
unions' autonomy.

The attempt to control the workers' movement from above began as soon as Hugo Chávez was 
elected president of Venezuela. In 1999 a clash began with the traditional Confederación 
de Trabajadores de Venezuela (CTV), a labor union created in 1947 by the influence of 
Acción Democrática (AD) [2], and changed, since 1959, into the main negotiator of the 
labor policies developed by the state. Nevertheless, in spite of Chavismo's questions 
about the irregularities and vices of this organization, in the abscence of their own 
labor movement, they participated in its internal elections in October 2001. The 
Bolivarian candidate, Aristóbulo Isturiz, was defeated by the AD candidate Carlos Ortega, 
who became the president of the CTV. A year and a half later, repeating the same history 
of the CTV, the government created by decree what it called "the real labor union": the 
Unión Nacional de Trabajadores (UNT), which quickly reproduced the corruption that it 
claimed to fight. One Marxist organization that participated in its foundation, Opción 
Obrera, says it more clearly than us: "The UNT was born under agreements from above, and 
was ridden for a show for the rank and file; few authentic union leaders had power in 
it... [3] The UNT was born with governmental protection, which lifted it up. The 
criticized "perks" of the old CTV unionism are now granted to the leaders of the UNT, who 
are staunch supporters of the government." Paradoxically, before the limited acceptance of 
the new labor union among the mass of workers, and the resistance of some sectors of the 
union to their cooptation, the Bolivarian power promoted new organizations in order to 
displace the UNT, as is the case of the Frente Socialista Bolivariano de los Trabajadores 
(FSBT).

A second milestone, justified with the argument of weakening the CTV bureaucracy, was the 
promotion of the so-called "union parallelism" [4] from the seat of government, creating 
unions artificially, from outside, in the principal industries of the country. In this way 
Chavismo would be able to publicize that with almost 700 registered unions, the Bolivarian 
process has promoted the organization of workers like nothing has before. However, this 
rise of the unions did not mean their greater influence on labor policies. One indicator 
is the end of the discussion of collective contracts in the public sector, counting 243 
expired, paralyzed and unsigned contracts at the end of 2007, in a sector that in May 2009 
employs 2,244,413 people, a quarter of those contracted by the private sector.

The decisions on salaries, labor conditions, and labor law are made unilaterally by the 
institutions of the state, after which they are mechanically ratified by the spokespersons 
of the UNT. In addition to the fragmentation and loss of capacity for pressure and 
negotiation, union parallelism has exacerbated the disputes for control of those 
workplaces in the areas of oil and construction - in which the union can place 70 out of 
100 recruits - which have increased the cases of assassination of union leaders and 
workers in inter-union strife. Between June 2008 and when this text was written, there 
have been 59 murders that spread with the greatest impunity.

A third element is the creation of the Partido Socialista Unido de Venezuela (PSUV), a 
partisan body that, in president's own words, should absorb all organizations that support 
the Bolivarian process, including the unions. A few defended the independence of the 
workers' organizations, but dissent from the official line was not tolerated. In march of 
2007 Chávez affirmed in a speech "The unions should not be autonomous... we must end with 
that," which was followed by successive declarations in the same line, reaching the zenith 
in march of 2009, when after ridiculing the demands of the basic industries of Guayana - 
the biggest industrial belt of the country - he threatened to use the police to crush any 
attempts at demonstrations or strikes there. For a revolutionary like Orlando Chirino, it 
was unbearable, stating at the time that it "constituted a declaration of war against the 
working class."

Various initiatives are currently being developed to increase control over the country's 
workers. For one thing, laws have been passed that limit and criminalize protest, 
requiring people to report periodically to the courts, in addition to prohibiting them 
from participation in meetings and demonstrations, such as occurred this past July 13 to 5 
union leaders of the oil refinery of El Palito, in the west of the country. According to 
figures from spokespersons of the affected communities, at least 2,200 people would be 
currently subject to the scheme. It must be brought out that, curiously, more than 80% are 
part of the movement to support the national government. This detail is significant 
because since 2008 has come increasing social unrest in the face of the miseries and 
limitations of material life for workers on the ground. The protests for social rights 
have displaced the mobilizations for political rights, that set the scene during the years 
2002 and 2006. The failure to meet the expectations generated by Bolivarian rhetoric, the 
weakening of patronage networks by declining oil revenues and the stagnation and decline 
of effective social policies, known as "missions," have catalyzed the accumulated unrest 
in the absence of profound transformations that significantly improve the quality of life 
for the majority of the country. Another initiative underway, again by decree from above, 
is the replacement of unions with "workers' councils" for discussing work conditions in 
companies, a proposal entered in the reform of the Organic Labor Law (LOT), a regulation 
that has been discussed in secret in the National Assembly, an executive that is promoted 
around the world as a champion of "participatory democracy."

Other laws, that seem to have no connection to the world of work, have also been 
restricting workers' rights. That's the case with the reformed Law of Land Transit, which 
in its article 74 prohibits the closure of streets to obstruct pedestrian and vehicle 
traffic, which has been the historical practice of protest by the popular sectors, 
especially in demanding their labor rights. Meanwhile, on August 15 an Organic Law of 
Education was passed, which has provoked protest by opposition groups for its secularism 
and for establishing strict regulations for private education institutions. However, what 
this center-right and social-democratic opposition does not question, much less Chavismo, 
are the limitations to the right of association, unionization, and collective bargaining, 
which is not guaranteed. One sign of the reactionary character of the order is section 5.f 
of the first transitional provision, which states that teachers and professors engage in 
serious misconduct "by physical aggression, speech, and other forms of violence" against 
their superiors. To make matters worse, the fifth transitional provision regulates the use 
of scabs "for reasons of proven necessity" in order to break strikes and work stoppages, a 
practice that has become habitual in so-called "Bolivarian Venezuela." In addition, the 
Chavista movement has driven an onslaught against the media outlets that don't accommodate 
the government, whose principle motivation is the visibility of the conflicts and protests 
that they provide, in contrast with the scarce coverage of the state and para-state media, 
self-declared "alternative and community," but without editorial and financial 
independence of any kind.

The role of Venezuelan anarchists in this moment of fracture of Bolivarian hegemony is to 
participate, accompany, and radicalize the conflicts, from below and with the people, and 
in this way to stimulate the recovery of the belligerent autonomy of the social movements. 
They must also become actively involved in the construction of a different, revolutionary 
alternative to the inter-bourgeois conflict for the control of the oil revenues that has 
engulfed the political scene in recent years, fighting the Bolivarian bourgeoisie in power 
with the same impetus as the potential rearticulations of those political parties it has 
displaced. In this way we walk, as always, without giving any concession to power and 
having our old values (self-management, direct action, anticapitalism and mutual aid, 
among others) as a bright horizon.


1. Literally a "coup-ist," the connotation is a national traitor
2. AD is a Venezuelan center-left party
3. Literally "in the direction converged few authentic leaders with union trajectory"
4. "Parallel association" might be a better translation

Translated by Dan Knutson

Original Spanish article:
http://www.nodo50.org/tierraylibertad/4articulo.html
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