This article was originally posted by The Latin American Herald Tribune
One of the sectors against whom the Hugo Chávez administration has committed most outrages is that of the workers.
These outrages go from mass firings – the 20,000 oil workers and the thousands of workers who have been left jobless as a result of the numerous confiscations and expropriations of companies and farms, for example – to the government’s failure to comply with the collective employment contracts or honor the labor benefits of workers in the government services.
What usually happens is that the government keeps putting off negotiating employment contracts with its workers or, if it negotiates them, it doesn’t honor them or, what is worse, it signs them and then changes its mind, as it did with the workers of the Caracas Metro.
Today any trade union or workers movement that is not controlled by the government sponsored trade union UNETE or by the government’s political party, Partido Socialista Unido de Venezuela (PSUV), is defenseless against the government’s arbitrary actions and decisions. This defenselessness is much more acute for trade union movements that are active in private companies.