Revolution and Counter-revolution in Venezuela: Assessing the Role of the AFL-CIO

As one of the national coordinators for the labor central known as the National Union of Workers (Uniόn Nacional de Trabajadores, or UNT) Gil provides a connection between the aluminum workers and the leadership of the fledgling labor central. The UNT seeks to displace the Confederation of Venezuelan Labor (CTV), historically the dominant union body in the country. It aims to undo decades of decline by organized labor: Gil estimated that real wages in his plant haven’t risen in 18 years.

Even so, Gil’s job has allowed him to buy a Ford F-150 pickup truck. He’s also been able to purchase a new house, thanks to special loans available to employees of Alcasa and other companies in the industrial CVG state enterprises that dominate Ciudad Guyana. However, workers at CVG and other state enterprises have a standard of living that is increasingly removed from the majority of Venezuelan workers. Overall, real wages fell 23 percent during the 1990s as 60 percent of the population was forced to turn to the informal sector of the economy. Estimates put the poverty level as high as 80 percent.

That division is palpable in Ciudad Guyana, where a wide river separates a planned city of big metalworking plants and comfortable homes from the impoverished barrios where Gil grew up. He’s also a member of the Bolivarian Workers Force (Fuerza Bolivariana de Trabajadores, or FBT), which supports the “revolutionary process” of President Hugo Chávez and the government “missions” that have given the poor access to medical care, higher education, land reform, subsidized food markets and more. Now Gil, a member of the union Sindicato de Trabajadores de Alcasa, or SINTRALCASA, wants to help build a labor movement capable of fighting for those workers’ interests as well.

“Here in Venezuela, the situation in the unions is similar to all the countries in Latin America and, I would say, the greater part of the world,” Gil said in an interview last August. “The number of unionized workers isn’t more than 12 percent. That means we can’t win.” Therefore, he said, the UNT demands “universal unionization,” in which “workers in every enterprise, economic sector, and branch of work can vote for a union in a way that’s massive, plural, and in a representative [labor] central.” Gil’s perspectives on unions put him squarely on the left wing of the UNT, which is contending with more moderate forces for leadership of the new federation. In October 2004, Gil, who had previously served as the general secretary of SINTRALCASA, recaptured his old post in a recall election that ousted his rival, Trino Silva. But the Venezuelan Supreme Court ruled the election to be illegal, several weeks later.

The internal struggle in the UNT reflects the pressures on organized labor in a highly polarized society. Yet, for both the AFL-CIO representative in the Andes and the CTV executive board member Froilán Barrios, the UNT is an “arm of the state.” An example, said Barrios, is the recently launched gas workers union, Sindicato Unitario de Trabajadores del Gas (SUTG). “Every day this union seems more like the unions of the ex-USSR and Cuba—a type of commissariat of the Communist Party, where they are more repressive organs against the workers.” Barrios acknowledged that there are clasista (class-conscious) leaders in the UNT. But others, he said, “are using their relationship with the state, well, to enrich themselves.”

There is a history of union corruption in Venezuela—overwhelmingly within the CTV. In her book The Failure of Political Reform in Venezuela, the British academic Julia Buxton describes it as one of the “richest and most powerful union confederations in the world” in its heyday. The CTV’s intimate ties with the political establishment allowed “for the illicit enrichment of union leaders, who acquired a personal interest for maintaining the model of [political] party control,” she wrote. In fact, the Venezuelan state provided 90 percent of the funding for the CTV in the 1960s and 1970s. The AFL-CIO’s ties to the CTV, moreover, have been among its closest with any foreign labor federation. This relationship has continued despite the CTV’s alliance with the forces that mounted the April 2002 coup—of which the CIA had foreknowledge—that was embraced by the Bush administration. The AFL-CIO’s support for the CTV continued through the devastating oil industry lockout, and the strike that followed.

There are in fact serious criticisms to be made about the Chávez government from a trade union standpoint. Yet, by rejecting the legitimacy of the UNT out of hand, and backing the CTV, the AFL-CIO has lent political credibility to the conservative Venezuelan opposition. This, in turn, has revived debate over the AFL-CIO’s involvement in U.S. foreign policy. Indeed, a look at the AFL-CIO’s past and present in Venezuela points to two conclusions: that the files on organized labor’s collaboration with U.S. foreign policy should be opened, and that the AFL-CIO’s reliance on government funds for international work should end.

The AFL-CIO and Venezuela: a brief history

The CTV emerged from underground work in a military dictatorship in 1958 to play a central role in the Acciόn Democrática (AD) party of President Rómulo Betancourt. The AD, nominally a social democratic party, made a power-sharing deal with the conservative Catholic party, the Comité de Organización Política Electoral Independiente (Catholic Committee for Political Organization and Independent Election—COPEI), to exclude political rivals—most importantly the Communist Party. The CTV leadership reflected this arrangement, as political cronyism and corruption permeated the political system.

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