the struggle for workers' power in venezuela (stuart munckton, july 2007):
However, enormous hopes were raised with the formation of the National Union of Workers (UNT) in 2003, which supported the revolutionary process. The UNT quickly overtook the right-wing, discredited Confederation of Venezuelan Workers (CTV), which had helped organise attempts to overthrow the Chavez government.
(...) The UNT has since been weakened by internal fighting, and the movement for co-management has largely stalled. While Chavez has called for workers to be in the forefront of the revolution, there is a difficult struggle to find a way to advance the organisation of workers in order to drive the increasingly radical economic program of the revolution forward and develop workers’ power.
(...) “Everyone inside the UNT agreed, when we met with them, that it has never been as dispersed and fractured as it is now”, Fuentes said. “It is now made up of five different currents, and there is a sense that perhaps the UNT will completely split. At the moment it is a de facto split, where everyone refers to themselves as a particular current of the UNT. No-one actually speaks on behalf of the UNT as a whole.

[THE TWO ISSUES]
(...) Fuentes commented on two of the key issues of debate within the union movement. “The first is the role of the union in relation to the government, which partially comes down to how to categorise the government, and beyond that the state.” Fuentes said that while the debate is not expressed in such a counterposed way, it is “essentially about whether the role of the union movement is solely to support government policies, or should the union movement also defend workers against some actions, of, if not so much the government, then the state bureaucracy.”
(...) Fuentes told GLW that the second issue related to the recent legislation allowing for the formation of workers’ councils in public and private workplaces across the country, in order to allow workers to exercise democratic control over production. Fuentes said this has provoked the question of “what is the role of unions themselves? Is there a need to go beyond unions to focus on the workers’ councils, giving unions a secondary role? Should the unions and such councils go hand in hand in the next stage of this process, or are unions more important than the workers’ councils?” Fuentes said the latter view “comes from one of the currents that is very concerned about the workers’ councils, [as it] doesn’t believe they will be real organs of power, and therefore doesn’t want to give up the existing role of unions”.
(...) [very important: this transforms the question of autonomy, certainly, since that typically refers to remaining autonomous from a state that stands apart from Labor] Fuentes said that “there is an important discussion that is becoming more and more public, which is around the concept [promoted by Chavez] of creating socialist state enterprises”. This is a discussion on how state-owned industry should be organised and how it can be integrated into a new, democratically planned economy run according to people’s needs. The role of the corrupt state bureaucracy the Chavez government has inherited from previous regimes has proven that simply having industry state-owned doesn’t mean it will automatically be run in such a way, but can instead be a source of corruption run on behalf of the old elite.
(...) “But it is unclear exactly what scope these councils will have, and what their intersection with the communal councils will be. Some in the union movement were a bit concerned about some statements made by the labour minister that seemed to imply that the councils would essentially be given a supervisory role, rather than be real decision-making bodies in the workplace. But I don’t think the question has been resolved yet.”
(...) One of the aims of the brigade of Australian unionists to Venezuela in May was to gather more information for a debate within the International Labour Organisation about whether it should continue recognising the discredited CTV, or the UNT. Fuentes said that whatever problems the UNT is struggling to overcome, it was clear that the CTV no longer has any real weight among Venezulean workers.