[new union federation called by oswaldo vera]
(...)In a joint press conference with Venezuela's Labor Minister Jose Ramon Rivero on Sunday, National Assembly Deputy and coordinator of the Bolivarian Socialist Workers Force (FSBT), a faction with in the National Union of Workers (UNT), announced the formation of a new national union federation and called on unions to disaffiliate from the UNT.
(...) With 24 national coordinators, the UNT was formed essentially as an alliance of union leaders that later came to represent five major currents within the Bolivarian labor movement (the FSBT, the Collective of Workers in Revolution (CTR), the United Revolutionary Autonomous Class Current (C-CURA), the Alfredo Maneiro current, and Union Autonomy, as well as a number of smaller currents). It was promised that elections for the national leadership would be carried out within 3 months of the founding congress. However, after much internal wrangling over the modalities of the vote, they were repeatedly postponed and have so far never taken place.
(...) Of Venezuela's 11 million workers, 3 million are unionized (the majority of which are affiliated to the UNT, though some still remain affiliated to the CTV). Of these 3 million, Vera said the new union federation aims to organize 2 million.
(...) [oh oswaldo] The Venezuelan union movement also has to overcome the "bad practice" of failing to hold elections he added in an interview on state owned television station VTV today. However, Vera's current was instrumental in opposing elections proposed by C-CURA and others in the 2006 UNT congress. Critics have also accused the FBST of failing to hold elections in individual unions they control.
(...) However, other national coordinators of the UNT, including Stalin Perez Borges, Marcela Maspero, and Orlando Chirino rejected Vera's claims that the majority of national sectoral unions support the new federation. Chirino, a leader of C-CURA accused the "red bureaucrats" of the government of carrying out a "coup" via the FSBT "against the autonomous and democratic will of the Venezuelan workers." For Chirino the proposed new federation is a sign that Venezuela is heading towards Stalinism because "the government wants to control the labor movement."
(...) Máspero, the only female national coordinator of the UNT and leader of the of the CTR current, said this new federation "emerges from the endogenous right wing of the revolution" and accused the FSBT of implementing "the same bureaucratic practices as the CTV."
(...) Socialist Tide argued that it is necessary for the union movement to be reorganized from the grassroots, "because we are conscious that while we continue to be dispersed the bosses and the endogenous right win. As long as we are disarticulated the workers will not be the social subject in the revolutionary process that we are living through in Venezuela."