Workers Face Intimidation and Reprisals in the Wake of Agroisleña Takeover

by Francisco Toro (@CaracasChron)

As soon as he heard that President Chávez had issued an expropriation decree for Agroisleña – a major agricultural extension service firm providing seed, fertilizer and credit to more than thousands of growers – José Rocha knew his life was about to change forever. He couldn’t have guessed, though, was that it would all happen so fast.

“State Police, National Police, Army, National Guard, Bolivarian Militia: they all showed up the next day,” says Rocha, 35, who’d worked at Agroisleña’s tech support help-desk for over 15 years – his entire career. From then on, Rocha would be working under the gaze of heavily armed men.

More disconcerting than the regular police and Armed Forces presence, he says, were these guys wearing green Che Guevara T-shirts with double-barreled shotguns slung across their backs milling ominously around the plant. “I don’t know which group they belonged to – I’m not an expert in these things,” Rocha says, “but they didn’t seem to be part of any organized security force, maybe they had something to do with some private security detail.” One thing is for sure: when people like that overrun the place where you work, you don’t waltz up to them and ask for I.D.

This takeover on October 4th set the stage for a tense few weeks when Agroisleña’s employees would have to get used to working in a heavily ideologized environment or suffer the consequences. According to another company worker who spoke on condition of anonymity, “we couldn’t have any meeting inside the office without at least two or three members of the takeover team coming to listen in.”

For Rocha, the pressure was intense: “imagine having to work with armed people looking over your shoulders at all times,” He says. “They made it clear to us that people who didn’t share the president’s ideology wouldn’t have a future inside of the company,” says Rocha.

It was no bluff.

Within a few weeks, he was fired.

The story of Agroisleña started in 1958 when a Spanish immigrant from the Canary Islands, Enrique Fraga, founded the company. The company grew to be the leader in the agricultural services market in Venezuela and even exported goods to other Latin American countries.  At the time of its expropriation, the company employed 2,500 employees and was said to be responsible for 12,000 more indirect jobs.  Many of the farmers it serves were themselves descendants of Spanish immigrants that still practice agriculture.

Today, two months after the Agroisleña takeover, some 100 former employees have been fired, with another 15 or so choosing to quit rather than endure the heavy intimidation. At the same time, over 300 company salesmen – who work largely on commission – haven’t received their sales bonuses since the takeover. And, by all accounts, morale among those left behind is low and deteriorating.

Of particular concern is that none of those who have lost their jobs have received their statutory severance pay; the cornerstone of Venezuela’s social safety net. Weeks of protests outside Agroisleña’s head office in Aragua State have ensued.

Technically, Venezuelan workers have an absolute legal right to severance pay. A form of “deferred compensation”, severance pay in Venezuela is actually a portion of employees’ salaries that employers are legally obliged to set aside each month and deposit in a ringfenced, interest-bearing bank account, to be paid as a lump-sum when an employee leaves the company.

There are virtually no circumstances under Venezuelan labor law where an employer is allowed to withhold severance pay; doing so is tantamount to picking the fired workers’ pocket. These days, though, Venezuelan labor law seems to apply to private sector employers only. The takeover board isn’t just refusing to handover employees’ deferred compensation, it’s refusing to even schedule a meeting with the fired workers to talk about the issue.

For José Rocha, there could hardly have been a worse time to lose the only job he’s ever had. His first-born son is just six months old now, leaving his wife to support the family on her salary alone. “I spend most of my time at home now,” he says, “taking care of the baby.”

Venezuelan labor law, as amended under the Chávez regime, bans firing parents of children under one year old. That, needless to say, made no difference either.

Still, what rankles Rocha the most is the petty humiliations he was subjected to.

“They didn’t really bother to tell me what was going on,” he says, “one day I came into the office and found another person sitting at my desk. Simple as that.”

After milling around the office for some time, unsure what to do, he was approached by one of the new security personnel who told him he could no longer be in the building and escorted him to the front desk. Only after pleading with the guard to explain what was going on did the new Human Resources team get around to informing him he’d been fired.

“Imagine you’ve been working for a company for 15 years and when they go to fire you they send a guy with a gun to physically throw you out!” he says, bitterly.

For Rocha and his former co-workers, the future is full of uncertainty. “They say the company was exploiting us, but the truth is that I’d made plans for my future that went hand-in-hand with the company’s future,” he says. All of that is now shattered.

When Venezuelan firms get nationalized, the government usually portrays the move as a way to defend the workers from the predations of their capitalist paymasters. Agroisleña was no exception. It’s just that the workers so bravely defended by such measures are, more often than not, oddly abstract: the actual, flesh-and-bone people who work in expropriated companies, in contrast, get screwed.