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Workers taking back control
by Katie Cherrington
The Bolivarian revolution is creating a mini-revolution in Venezuela’s labour movement. In May 2003, the National Union of Workers (UNT) was formed in opposition to the existing corrupt trade union federation, the Confederation of Venezuelan Workers (CTV).
Although the UNT is still a new formation, with many internal debates on the best way forward, it is beginning to develop a new and democratic unionism, based on rank-and-file involvement and demands for democracy in the workplace. The latter is being fought for through a process known as cogestion (co-management) whereby workers help run their workplaces, in conjunction with the state, via a combination of elected managers drawn from the work force and worker assemblies. This process is currently limited to a small number of companies, but the UNT is pushing for its extension.
In May 2005, more than 1 million workers attended the UNT-organised May Day march in Caracas, under the slogans of “Co-management is revolution” and “Venezuelan workers are building Bolivarian socialism”. The CTV-organised march attracted little more than a thousand. May Day 2005 signalled the decisive end of the CTV’s dominance over Venezuela’s labour movement, and the rise of the pro-revolution UNT as the most significant force.
CTV
Since its creation in the 1930s, the CTV has been allied to Democratic Action (AD), one of the two parties that alternated in government between 1958 and 1998. During the 1980s and ’90s, casualisation and an increase of temporary contracts caused a downward slide in conditions for many workers. With increasing unemployment, the informal economy expanded to more than 50% of workers, dramatically reducing the unionisation rate. By the time of Chavez’s election in 1998, just 14% of those employed in the formal sector were organised into unions.
Although the CTV initially spoke out against neoliberal policies, by the mid-1990s it abandoned criticism, even signing on to a Venezuela-IMF agreement. At the request of then-President Rafael Caldera, the CTV participated in a commission to draw up the 1997 labour legislation, which disadvantaged workers in low-paid jobs and the informal sector. The CTV failed to oppose the privatisation of state assets in the 1990s that was only stopped with the election of Chavez.
While this made the CTV increasingly unpopular amongst workers, its lack of internal democracy meant that the rank and file were powerless to change the leadership, which repeatedly ignored calls from its members for democratic elections.
Chavez’s election
Chavez’s election in 1998 heralded a fundamental shift in state priorities — to put the needs of the poor ahead of multinationals’ profits. As part of this shift, the minimum wage has been increasingly raised, by 20-30% every year since 2000. Such reforms have given renewed confidence to workers accustomed to a long tradition of corrupt corporate unionism — one based on deals with political parties and employers’ federations, not grassroots struggle.
Contrasting with its sycophantic approach to previous neoliberal governments, the CTV has been one of the most vocal opponents of the Chavez government. Its complete bankruptcy as a pro-worker organisation was revealed when it actively participated in the 2002 US-backed military coup. Then, in December of that year, the CTV collaborated with the main chamber of commerce to help organise the bosses’ lockout, giving this capitalist sabotage cover by calling it a “general strike”, despite the overwhelming majority of workers not supporting such a call.
For many Venezuelans, this was the final straw, and the struggle against the lockout radicalised many workers, giving them confidence in their ability to organise without the CTV. In May 2003, workers from nearly every sector of Venezuelan labour came together to form a new national federation — the UNT.
The UNT has grown astonishingly fast. Jonah Gindin points out in the June 2005 Monthly Review that “one way of estimating [the UNT’s] momentum is to count the percentage of collective agreements signed with each confederation. According to the Ministry of Labor, 76.5% of collective agreements signed in 2003-04 were with unions affiliated with the UNT, and only 20.2% with the CTV.”
Gindin quotes Freddy Contreras, the secretary of culture for a new UNT-affiliated union at a Coca-Cola Femsa plant in Valencia, on the old union’s approach: “It was the perspective of the bosses, a perspective that strengthened the company and weakened the new workers movement.”
The new unions face great challenges: they have to battle against the old unions, as well as the bosses. But through this struggle comes useful experience. A key task for these unions is enshrining rank-and-file participation in structures. The ability for workers in an industry to organise a referendum on which union should represent them, or to throw out the existing union leadership, is now enshrined in law. This means that if a leader fails to respond to the membership, they run the risk of being shown the door.
Gindin quoted Freddy Salazar, a mechanic at Owens Illinois: “The new union has only been around for a few weeks, so it’s a bit premature to be evaluating their achievements. What I can say is that the referendum was important because it showed us that we can also remove leaders that no longer represent us, not only add new ones. If the new union doesn’t represent our interests, we know and they know that we can just have another referendum and replace them like we did the old union.”
Government support
The policies of the Chavez government directly assist the development of a democratic labour movement. In April 2003, following the failed oil strike, the government declared a moratorium on lay-offs for low-paid workers that still holds today. The UNT’s regional Carabobo director Jose Juaquin Barreto told Gindin that because of the moratorium, “The company could not fire the workers organizing … to start fighting for their rights … Thanks to the government, these workers had the breathing room they needed to organise the new union, hold the referendum, and now have some of the tools necessary to take the fight to the bargaining table and make some concrete gains.”
Another sign of government support for worker demands came with the nationalisation of Venepal, a paper-manufacturing company. The company was trying to declare bankruptcy and lay its workers off, but the workers occupied the factory and restarted production. After an attempt to make a deal with management failed, the workers campaigned for the nationalisation of the company and the introduction of worker-state comanagement. In January 2005, the government met this demand. The government has since nationalised an important valve company occupied by workers under similar circumstances.
Demands for cogestion to be introduced into workplaces have been central to the unions affiliated to the UNT. There are significant ongoing debates about how to introduce real workers’ control, instead of the tokenistic cooption of a workers’ representative into existing management structures. In a June 10 report posted at Marxism.com, English socialist Alan Woods quoted an oil industry (PDVSA) worker he spoke to on an April visit to Caracas: “The workers of PDVSA are fighting for a change, but there are many on the management side who argue that the company is too complicated for us to run it. Well, in that case we will learn the necessary skills! We propose the setting up of a workers’ university to train the workers.”
The most successful attempt to implement cogestion has been at the state-owned aluminium factory ALCASA, where the workers elect their managers and hold regular mass assemblies of the workers to discuss the running of the plant, as well as regular popular assemblies with the local community. Since cogestion has been introduced, production has consistently increased.
Another example of the effectiveness of workers democratically running production came in the electricity industry. In a May 6 Venezuelanalysis.com article, Marta Harnecker reported on successes after a significant natural disaster in a regional area of Venezuela in February 2005. She quoted Zaida Gill, general secretary of the Cadela Electric Union of Merida: “Everybody calculated it would take two months to re-establish power in Santa Cruz, but let me tell you that ... with astonishing team work capacity ... [the workers] re-established power in less than 48 hours.”
Unfortunately, corrupt managers have currently succeeded in preventing the entrenchment of cogestion in the state-run electricity company, although the workers, with the support of Chavez and the labour ministry, continue to struggle to implement it.
In order to break with an entrenched corrupt and bureaucratic model of unionism, a process of re-education of labour leaders and the rank and file has been necessary. The working people have been the driving force of the Venezuelan revolution, and the struggle to deepen their organisation, both in terms of building grassroots, democratic unionism and the struggle for increasing democratic control over the economy through the process of cogestion are critical to the continued development of the revolution.
From Green Left Weekly, June 29, 2005.
