“We gave the company plenty of time to respond to our demands and they made fun of us,” said Jesús Fajardo, a worker at SIDOR, in a November 13 telephone interview. “Faced with the bosses’ intransigence, we had to take measures like lowering production to press the company to give us what was due.”

Fajardo is one of the 4,050 members of SUTISS at the huge steel works in Ciudad Guyana, Bolívar state. He first came in contact with the Militant when a reporting team for the paper visited Venezuela in September.

Faced with the union-organized slowdown, SIDOR was forced to make some concessions. It agreed to pay workers bonuses scheduled for 2004 and to give them a wage raise. This amounts to a pay increase of 129,000 bolivars ($80) per month. SUTISS members make an average monthly wage of 700,000 bolivars ($438).

Among the main demands of the workers was to be given the incentive pay stipulated in the contract, which says the company has to provide such bonuses based on the overall productivity, efficiency, and safety record of employees in the steel works. According to Fajardo, this amounted to about 10 percent of the workers’ annual pay and union members used to get it every year. “But since the company was privatized five years ago, we haven’t gotten any incentive pay,” Fajardo said.

The union and the company agreed to submit the productivity bonus dispute to arbitration, which is supposed to issue a ruling by February, four months before the current contract expires.

According to Valdemar Alvarez, a SUTISS executive board member, Venezuela’s constitution, adopted after Hugo Chávez was elected president in 1998, prohibits companies from cutting benefits such as incentive pay contained in union contracts.

“We are right and we have the proof to defend ourselves,” said Carlos Ramírez, a technician and union member at SIDOR, in a telephone interview. “The bosses were never able before to take such benefits away. We won’t let them.”

SIDOR is the top private company in Venezuela in terms of exports. It’s the fourth-largest steel producer in Latin America and the continent’s top exporter of finished steel products. Last year, SIDOR produced 3.3 million metric tons of liquid steel and its total exports amounted to $584 million.

The company was state owned until 1997. That year, shortly before Chávez’s election to the presidency, the government of Rafael Caldera sold a majority stake to foreign investors. Today, the Amazonia consortium—which is owned by capitalists in Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, and Venezuela—controls 60 percent of the company’s shares. The Venezuelan government has a 40 percent stake.

After the company was privatized, the bosses cut the workforce from 18,000 to 11,000. About half the workforce is now made up of contratistas, that is, temporary (or contract) workers. According to Fajardo and Ramírez, the bosses pushed back the union and succeeded in displacing some 5,000 SUTISS members with temporary workers who are not covered by the union contract.

The contract workers get paid the minimum wage of 200,000 bolivars per month ($125), which is more than $300 per month less than union members.

Ramírez said that union members carried out the job actions in October not only to secure a wage raise but also to press the company to improve safety conditions. Accidents on the job have shot up in the last five years, the unionist said, as the workforce was reduced while production increased by 39 percent. “Over the last year, five workers have died from accidents on the job,” Ramírez said. “All of them were contract workers. They are more vulnerable because they are forced to work under worse conditions than those of us in the union.”

The unionists are also fighting to bridge the gap in wages and working conditions between contract and full-time workers, several union members said. “SUTISS is in the process of collecting signatures on the job among contract workers to press their demands for safer working conditions,” Alvarez said. “They are the most affected by the bosses’ offensive. We are also holding meetings with the company to press their demands and have approached unions who organize contract workers to put pressure on the company from that angle too.”

The confrontation between the company and the union in October was typical of the guerrilla warfare between the bosses and the workers at SIDOR for the last five years. According to Universal, one of the country’s main dailies, SUTISS president Ramón Machuca stated that the union has organized 300 work stoppages or slowdowns the last five years, in addition to a strike in 2001 that stopped production for 23 days.

In response to the slowdown, SIDOR began withholding three to five days pay from a number of union militants, according to Alvarez. The bosses also launched a media campaign, claiming that the union was putting the jobs of thousands of workers in jeopardy with irresponsible actions. On October 14, the company obtained a court ruling ordering the union to put an end to the production slowdown.

“What SIDOR claims is not new,” said union president Ramón Machuca at a press conference. “They claim that the workers don’t produce enough or they are violent. SIDOR fails to point out that, for the first time in the company’s history, the workers are producing a record of nearly 4 million metric tons of steel.”

Faced with this company offensive, the union organized massive workers’ assemblies on the job. On October 28, about 4,000 union members and supporters, including hundreds of contract workers at SIDOR, took part in a march in nearby Puerto Ordaz to press their cause. According to Fajardo, other unionists who joined the demonstration included members of the electrical, health, and aluminum workers unions as well as many public employees.

The workers assembled at the offices of the Venezuelan Company of Guyana, which controls the stake at SIDOR owned by the government. In an open letter the union sent to president Hugo Chávez, SUTISS demanded that the government support their fight to enforce the union contract and improve conditions for all workers. In this letter, the union formally requested that the government renationalize SIDOR if the bosses refuse to abide by the contract.

“When we suggested the demand for nationalization in one of the assemblies on the job,” said Alvarez, “workers responded with a tremendous standing ovation, which took many of us by surprise.”

It was only when the workers showed their determination to take their struggle to the governmental level and after many mobilizations that the company backed off and agreed to some concessions, several unionists said.

The fight between the bosses and the workers at SIDOR is part of the intensification of the class struggle nationwide. Venezuela’s capitalist class has been trying for the last two years to topple the Chávez government because it has adopted a series of measures that have increased the expectations and self-confidence of working people. These include a bill strengthening state control over the country’s oil and natural gas resources.

Steelworkers and other unionists are now using these laws to try to tilt the relationship of forces towards the workers.

Meanwhile, Fedecámaras, the country’s main big-business association, is spearheading a referendum to recall the president. The opposition coalition Coordinadora Demócratica (Democratic Coordination) is scheduled to collect signatures on a petition demanding such a referendum the first week of December.

“If they want a recall referendum against Chávez, let them try to do it,” Fajardo said. “The workers, however, are overwhelmingly with the president because he is the only politician who has had the will to confront the opposition by the rich.”  
 
 
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