All the workers of the country are suffering the rigors of the crisis and the consequences of the anti-worker and anti-popular adjustment that the Maduro government has been unloading on our backs, plunging us into the most brutal impoverishment.
By: Socialist Workers Unity (UST)
Venezuelan section of the International League of Workers – Fourth International (LITCI)
The year 2022 closed with an inflation of 234%, according to official figures, however the data from the independent agency Observatorio Venezolano de Finanzas (OVF) speak of an accumulated inflation for the end of last year of 305%; but beyond the difference in the figures, the truth is that the devaluation and the galloping inflation have pulverized wages. The minimum wage barely exceeds $5, while the salary of a skilled professional worker barely reaches $12.
Such salaries pale to the level of ridiculous, if we take into account the evolution of the reference baskets in the country for the closing of January 2023. According to the Center for Documentation and Analysis of the Venezuelan Federation of Teachers (CENDAS – FVM) and the aforementioned OVF.
| Body | food basket | Basic basket |
| Cendas – FVM | 486,87 $ | 970$ |
| OVF | 397$ | 794$ |
The relationship is so disproportionate that the OVF has begun to introduce the concept of a survival basket, that is, a basket that includes the most essential goods that a family of 4 would need to survive. However, that minimum basket would be in the order of $22.16 per week, approximately $110 per month. With what current salaries are not even close to covering it.
Let’s unify the struggles for a salary equal to the basic basket and to defeat the anti-worker and anti-popular package of the government
These terrible salary conditions and the precarious living conditions that the country’s workers suffer force us to go out and mobilize. Since the beginning of the year, teachers and other education workers have been doing so, pointing the way forward for other workers in the National Public Administration (APN), as well as workers in the private sector.
In these demonstrations, there has been the support and active solidarity of workers from other unions, mainly health, university students and retirees, among others; as well as a significant sector of representatives, who have not sent their children and adolescents to school, as a way of supporting teachers and educational workers.
However, it is necessary that the directorates of the other unions indicated join the fight no longer as mere solidarity, but that they summon their members and place their own salary and contractual demands on the fighting agenda, unifying their struggles with those of the sector. education, through joint actions, decided and built in a democratic way.
It is clear that the salary problem transcends the teaching and education union and is common to all workers in the country, as are contractual violations, dismissals and abuses and the suffering of the package that the Maduro government applies in our against, that is why we must: unify our struggles to achieve a salary equal to the basic basket, indexed to its monthly value in $, and to defeat Maduro’s anti-worker and anti-popular package.
No to the criminalization of protest and government blackmail.
For several years the government has kept more than 150 workers detained for protesting and defending their salary, labor and contractual rights; among them several activists and union leaders.
With the start of the protests at the beginning of 2023, this repressive attitude and criminalization of the right to protest has once again become present. Teachers and educational workers have received a whole series of pressures and threats from the government, through school managers and union bureaucrats to break their struggle. Now they intend to put the representatives against this just fight with the blackmail that the students would be at risk of losing the school year.
But the most serious cases have occurred during the protests by SIDOR workers and basic companies, which took place simultaneously with the first demonstrations by workers in the education sector. In these, the government has detained and keeps more than 70 workers in prison and/or prosecuted, among them several of those who were summoned to the negotiating tables with which the protests were raised.
From the Socialist Workers Unit, we reject all these pressures and the criminalization of protest in general.
We demand an end to the repression, to the blackmail and the full and immediate release of the workers detained in the recent protests, as well as those of all the workers previously detained for defending their rights and exercising their legitimate right to protest.
We also affirm that the one who permanently curtails the right to education of children and adolescents and who puts the school year at risk is the government, when it keeps teachers and their representatives in a situation of miserable wages and also applying constant cuts to the budget for the sector, which leads to the schools, institutions, educational and food programs of the sector, being in deplorable situations, also forcing teachers to work without technical and material resources, having to take out of their pocket in order to guarantee the educational process what ends up impoverishing their already pitiful salaries even more.
Towards the general strike of the educational sector, for the construction of the unity of the struggles.
For these reasons, teachers, educational workers and representatives should not give in to such blackmail and should strengthen their struggle through the formation of conflict committees by schools, by neighborhoods, parishes, municipalities and states, with the participation of parents and community representatives. until the confirmation of a national conflict committee that calls for a general strike in the sector.
The union leaderships, grouped in the teachers’ union coalition, must deepen the process of organizing the conflict committees in a democratic manner and by the base, as well as summon the leaderships of the other unions of the APN to incorporate their demands and claims in the struggles and to unite in a great national movement, to defeat the Maduro government and its anti-worker and anti-popular policy, for a government of the workers and their organizations.
Salary equal to the basic basket, indexed to its monthly value in $
For the immediate discussion of the III single collective agreement of the education sector
For the repeal of memorandum 2792 and the ONAPRE instructions
Immediate freedom to all the workers imprisoned for fighting, not to the criminalization of the protest
Budget for wages and decent working conditions
No to salary bonus
No to external debt payment. Repatriation of escaped capital
Let’s defeat the government’s anti-worker, anti-popular and neoliberal package
Enough of the starving, corrupt and repressive government of Maduro
For a government of workers and popular sectors through their organizations