Labor

“On November 23, we will not just be voting for this or that governorship, we will be deciding the destiny of this revolutionary process”, says Stalin Perez Borges, a national coordinator of the National Union of Workers (UNT) and United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) militant.

An interview with Carlos Lanz, one of Venezuela's main socialist intellectuals and leaders, who pioneered worker management in one of Venezuela's largest state-owned companies, the Aluminum processing plant Alcasa. He talks to Michael Albert about how the workplace of the future would be organized, among other things.

On August 27, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez announced the end of negotiations with former owners Ternium over the nationalisation of the Sidor steel factory, stating that the government would “take over all the companies that it has here”, insisting Ternium “can leave”.

The owner of Fundimeca, an air conditioning factory in Valencia, Carabobo, is waging an intense campaign of terror and intimidation against the factory’s work force, which is fighting to ensure that the company complies with Venezuela’s constitution and labour laws.

On June 11, President Chavez, accompanied by several of his principal ministers, met with the 500 most important employers in Venezuela. He called there for "national unity". The socialist journal Marea Socialista asked Stalin Perez Borges to evaluate this meeting in the present Venezuelan context.

A series of recent events has opened up a new phase in Venezuela's labor movement. One of the most significant was the government’s decision to re-nationalise the Sidor steel works, one of the most important in Latin America, after an 18-month struggle by its work force.

“Once they got their wages, [the workers] occupied the installations and demanded that the company go, then they occupied the offices and demanded that the administration of Sincreba [Merida Waste Incineration and Recycling System] retire”, Simon Rodriguez told Green Left Weekly.

As May Day approaches once again, Federico Fuentes from www.greenleft.org.au interviews Stalin Pérez Borges (SPB), national coordinator of the National Union of Workers (UNT) and member of the editorial board of the newspaper Marea Socialista and Marcos Garcia (MG), national coordinator of the public sector federation, FENTRASEP and member also of Marea Socialista.

The recent replacement of the labor minister and the nationalization of Sidor have once again brought to the fore the question of the role of workers in Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution, whose participation as an organized class has been sporadic at best, in this process aimed at constructing ‘Socialism of the 21st Century.’

Denouncing the “coloniser attitude” and “barbarous exploitation” of workers by the management of the Sidor steel company, Venezuelan Vice President Ramon Carrizalez announced at 1.30am on April 9 that President Hugo Chavez had decided to nationalise the company.