the AFL should stop attacking and learn something (diana barahona, october 2005):
For 40 years the historically dominant Confederation of Venezuelan Workers (CTV) had an undemocratic structure and union bureaucrats collaborated with management to quash the struggles of rank-and-file workers. Democratic union activists were fired and even murdered while union bosses looked the other way. Now Venezuela has a new union federation. After the leadership of the CTV joined the business federation to support the 2002 military coup and then led a 63-day economic stoppage to force Chavez's resignation, pro-Chavez labor leaders founded the National Workers' Union (UNT) in April of 2003.
(...) There are an estimated 1.2 million workers affiliated with the UNT, which is the same number the CTV counted in its ranks in 2001. The CTV now has 200,000 workers according to one source.
(...) [attributes it to Chavez] Workers seized the opportunity which presented itself and have both supported Chavez and taken advantage of freedom to organize they never had before, supported by a two-year-old prohibition against laying off low-wage workers.
(...) The CTV was historically aligned with one of the two political parties that ruled Venezuela for 40 years, Democratic Action. Presidents of the CTV were party activists and corruption and cronyism were the order of the day.
(...) Asked about the CTV's loyalties, Linares said, "Initially, yes, it had class consciousness, but over time they became bureaucratic and it disappeared. As a matter of fact, there is a very important fact: you won't find a strike--go to the files of the ILO, where they were very well represented ... and there isn't one legal strike recorded in Venezuela during 40 years at the ILO. And we know that there were strikes. Here there were people injured, there were killings, there were confrontations with the police, with the national guard. The private sector guilds fought for their rights, for money, for pay; they fought for all those kinds of demands. But it wasn't recorded. Why? Because the CTV had to show the world that this was paradise."
(...) The AFL-CIO's American Institute for Free Labor Development, a cold war CIA front, had worked closely with the CTV in the early 1960s to purge it of communists at the same time that the Communist Party was decertified politically.
(...) In 1997, after over a decade of neoliberalism had impoverished the country, the CTV made an agreement with the rightist government of Rafael Caldera whereby it accepted a "reform" of the labor code.
(...) [important: question of the universality of unions, especially critical when the CTV claims autonomy] Two seminal events define modern Venezuelan history: the April 2002 military coup, which lasted 48 hours, and the December 2002-January 2003 economic sabotage, also known as the oil coup. Led by its president, Carlos Ortega, the CTV was a key protagonist of both actions, but rank-and-file workers were never consulted by the union leadership. In any event the rate of unionization in Venezuela has historically been very low: 14 percent of the formal sector comprising companies with five or more employees. So when the coup was reversed by uprisings in the military barracks but also the presence of masses of people in the streets around the presidential palace, workers were among those in the streets demanding the return of Chavez, though not as unions. In fact Linares says the only union that responded as such to restore Chavez to the presidency was his fledgling Passenger Transportation Workers Guild.
(...) In that lapse the CTV, again allied with the ruling class, plunged the country into the devastating oil stoppage which cost hundreds of thousands of jobs and more than $10 billion in economic losses, as oil production was cut from 3.1 million barrels a day to 25,000 barrels. Of the state oil company's (PdVSA) 35,000 permanent employees, 18,000 walked off the job.
(...) [post-oilstoppage, new federation founded] After the oil stoppage was defeated, everyone in the Bolivarian Workers' Force was convinced the time had come for a new federation, and on April 5, 2003, they formed the UNT.
(...) This year's May Day parades provided a graphic picture of the decline of the CTV. There were around half a million supporters at the UNT march while not even 1,000 marched with the CTV.
(...) On the labor front, Golinger documented more than $776,000 in different grants that the Solidarity Center received from the NED specifically to support the CTV between February 2001 and March 2002. The ACILS got another CTV support grant for $116,000 in September 2002, five months after the coup and three months before the oil stoppage. In his history of AIFLD (www.laboreducator.org/darkpast.htm) labor activist Harry Kelber says the grants continued in the same amount every three months until at least March 2004. According to Golinger, the ACILS continues to receive grants in excess of $100,000 annually for its work with the CTV. (http://www.venezuelafoia.info/acils.html)
(...) [very interesting discussion with respect to question of autonomy, and politics] Regarding the oil coup at the end of 2002, the ACILS did not fund the shutdown, although Gacek defends it as a legal collective action. He also points to the fact that 20,000 (actually less than 19,000) of a total 35,000 employees were terminated to imply that the action affected the rank-and-file and was anti-labor, and the CTV has taken the issue to the UN International Labor Organization. But PdVSA relies heavily on contract workers ­there will be 30,000 temporary positions this year on top of jobs held by employees. Without defending the practice of contracting, the fact is that permanent jobs are reserved for the elite ­mostly managers, administrators and skilled technicians ­and these are the people who walked off the job and crippled operations. The position of the government, which is supported by the rank-and-file, is that those fired abandoned their employment for 63 consecutive days, allowing PdVSA to apply section 102 of the Labor Code and terminate them. At any rate strikes in any part of the world may only be called over labor grievances, and Ortega's CTV was demanding the president's resignation. It was not a legal labor action but an illegal political action.