Structure to Unite Workers Created in Venezuela

[The Vegan Marxist]

Structure to Unite Workers Created in Venezuela
May 4, 2011

The First National Meeting of Socialist City and Land Workers concludes today with the birth of a unified structure of the Venezuelan working class to accompany the process of change led by Hugo Chavez, reported Prensa Latina.

Federations and trade unions from various sectors of the country also agreed on a provisional executive in charge of promoting the single central instrument in tune with the call by Chávez to form a Patriotic Focus that brings together social movements and defenders of the Bolivarian Revolution.

We are seeing an historic event, because this structure is called in to play a key role in building socialism, deputy Oswaldo Vera told Prensa Latina, as he left the forum opened on Monday at the Hotel ALBA Caracas.

According to the president of the Integrated Social Development Committee of the Parliament, in addition to the unity of the grass roots, the second day of the meeting will leave with an action plan with priorities like ensuring the re-election of Chávez in the December 2012 elections.

It will also fix a position on the role of workers and peasants in the struggle against speculation, the defense of wages and social benefits promoted by the Government and the establishment of laws that bury the capitalist mode of production, he said.

According to Vera, the creation of the single structure crowns more than six months of work.

Having taken the first steps, we will have a convention to consolidate the power under the leadership of President Chavez and a policy committed to the strengthening of the revolution and the construction of Venezuelan socialism, he said.

Oil worker, educators, industrialists, builders, farmers, fishermen and others are involved in the forum.

There is a need to unite to face the many challenges of this process, perhaps the most immediate being the re-election of Chavez in 2012, Will Rangel, president of the United Federation of Oil, Gas and Petrochemical Workers, told Prensa Latina in Caracas.

http://www.granma.cubaweb.cu/english/news/art0032.html

[el_chavista]

It has been and will be a long and winding road to achieving the unity of the working class in Venezuela.

After a ½ century of domination of labor-management central CTV (a sort of AFL-CIO) it was expected that the Movimiento V República did not have a great influence over the union movement, apart from isolated union leaders. This is demonstrated by the tiny role played by the working class when the 2002 military coup.

But the oil-owners strike of 2003-20?? coup was a different story. The once mighty CTV was unmasked as the filthy bourgeois politicians' appendix it was.

In response to the scourge of the counter-revolutionary "reaction whip", the working class began to move with revolutionary fervor: over a million workers marched in the demonstration on 1st of May 2005 and they began to be learned the first news of the seizing by workers of factories abandoned or under-utilized by their owners. I recall I thouth at that moment, "Man, this looks like a Proletarian Revolution, I got to be part of this!"

In 2006 Chávez put into consideration of the new trade union UNeTe Congress -for trade-union unity of that year- the existence of thousands of factories abandoned or underutilized by their owners that could be taken to finish the upset of the oil-owners coup. Unfortunately, the union leadership damaged the unit by their opportunistic confrontations and actually fights over administrative functions.

This new initiative of the Bolivarian movement will join the main union centrals: UNeTe (National Union of Workers), FBTS (Bolivarian Socialist Workers Front, CST (Socialist Workers Confederation) and many smaller others.