Discontent has once again taken to the streets of Venezuela.
After two years during which the number of protests in that country had been progressively declining, in 2022 the trend seems to have reversed.
According to the Venezuelan Observatory of Social Conflict, during the first half of this year there were some 3,892 protests, an average of 22 a day, which means an increase of 15% compared to the same period last year.
But unlike what happened in 2019 -the year in which there were more demonstrations in the last decade- when the protests for political reasons were the most numerous, during the first half of this 2022 it was labor rights that promoted the largest number of signs of discontent: 42% of the total.
This shift has to do with a clash between the labor policies of the government of Nicolás Maduro and the demands of public employees.
BBC Mundo explains why.
income rebates
In recent months there has been an upsurge in protests by public officials in Venezuela, especially those employed in the health and education sectors.
Only last July, there were about 143 labor conflicts, according to the Observatory of Labor Conflict and Union Management of the Institute of Advanced Union Studies (Inaesin).
Behind these protests is an instruction issued in March by the National Budget Office (ONAPRE) that reduces the income of public employees by between 40% and 70%, according to an Inaesin report.
“ONAPRE has taken on the task of issuing instructions to pay workers’ salaries and, since they have interfered in that, they have been violating the Constitution, laws and labor rights, because as they are applied these instructions, the salary of the workers has been decreasing,” says Belkys Bolívar, a member of the national board of the Venezuelan Federation of Teachers.
He explains that by means of these instructions, ONAPRE has been ignoring the benefits provided for in the collective contracts of public employees and has been reducing the amounts of the bonuses and premiums provided therein, which represent an important part of the income of these officials.
“In March of this year, when a salary increase was given through the Executive, they decided to lower all our bonuses that are in the collective agreement. They lowered them by 50%. For example, the academic compensation premiums for which the teacher studies postgraduate, master’s or doctorate degrees, they all lowered them by 50%,” he says.
He points out that they also reduced, for example, seniority premiums which, in his case, went from 60% to 30% of salary, and that a geographical premium, for those who work in rural areas, went from 25% to 10%, a decrease greater than 50%.
This policy has also affected other sectors of the public administration.
According to Pablo Zambrano, executive secretary of the National Federation of Health Workers, Fetrasalud, health officials in Venezuela have also lost more than 50% of their income due to the application of this ONAPRE instruction.
partial victory
Although this most recent instruction from ONAPRE has generated expressions of discontent since its enactment in March, the spark was recently lit when employees in the education sector received their traditional vacation bonus payment for an amount much lower than expected.
According to Bolívar, the law establishes that this bonus must be paid taking into account the last salary received by the worker, but that the government, instead of doing it taking into account that salary that was approved last March, did so based on the current salary. for December 2021.
The difference is remarkable.
“In my case, they paid me 140 bolívares (about US$23) and they should have paid me 2,400 bolívares (about US$400),” says Bolívar.
“As a result of that arbitrariness, then it was that demonstrations began to emerge. We had already been demonstrating for a long time on the issue that the salary is not enough to live on, but then we became active again. We went out to the streets, we were more than 3 weeks protesting so that they could not pay that vacation bonus with the salary with the last salary,” he says.
And they won a partial victory.
On October 15, Maduro dismissed the then director of ONAPRE, Marco Polo Cosenza, and appointed Jennifer Quintero de Barrios, who until then was in charge of the National Treasury, to that position.
And shortly after, officials in the education sector began to receive the outstanding difference from the vacation bonus in their accounts.
However, the ONAPRE instructions have not been repealed, so public workers have announced that they will remain active because their objective is for this rule to be eliminated and for the government to catch up with other debts that they have pending with them. .
starvation wages
Bolívar indicates that the discomfort caused by the incomplete payment of the vacation bonus does not have to do with the vacations of the officials but with the need they have for the money.
“People always wait for vacations to solve personal problems with that money because we don’t really use it to go on vacation. That’s not enough to go on vacation with our family group,” he says, pointing out that these resources are used to plug the holes in the budget that they cannot cover with their salaries.
He explains that among the teachers who work in the public administration in Venezuela there are six categories. At the lowest they earn about 400 bolívares a month (about US$67) and at the highest, about 900 bolívares a month (about US$150).
“Those are unworthy wages. It is a starvation wage because it is not enough to cover our food needs. In addition to the fact that we also have health and other needs. When an accident occurs, when a family member dies, we do not have how cover these situations and we have to look for solidarity, ask on social networks, ask our colleagues and relatives to help us, because the salary does not allow us to cover these needs,” he says.
The situation is not better in the case of health workers.
Pablo Zambrano explains that an administrative employee earns the equivalent of about US$30 a month, while a doctor earns a little more than US$100.
With these salaries they have to face a high cost of living.
The so-called food basket – which refers to the money needed to feed a family of five people each month – stood at US$459.84 in June, according to calculations by the Documentation and Social Analysis Center of the Venezuelan Federation of Teachers (Cendas-FVM).
Thus, the income of about three or four doctors per family would be needed to cover that basket monthly.
what has the government said
The Maduro government has handled this issue discreetly without its main figures having addressed it publicly.
According to the Venezuelan press, on August 8, while giving a speech, Maduro was interrupted by a woman who yelled at him about something related to ONAPRE, to which the president replied: “What you are saying is not like that and if you want We talked about it personally. It’s not true. It’s not true. It’s a little campaign that they have us on the networks and it’s not true. “
That same day, during a session of the National Assembly, the pro-government deputy Pedro Carreño defended the ONAPRE instructions, pointing out that the real problem was that the State had no money.
“That instruction that they demonize, that they subject to public ridicule, became a sort of retaining wall to curb the pretensions of the reactionary right that what it intends to show is that there is laziness in Venezuela because it is not in line with the workers’ rights, when the instructions actually say that there are no resources, there are no means, to resolve the needs,” he said.
BBC Mundo contacted the Ministry of Communication of the Venezuelan government to consult them on this issue, but at the time of publishing this note we had not received a response.
send the pocket
After a convulsive 2019, the discomfort expressed in the Venezuelan streets had decreased significantly.
According to figures from the Venezuelan Observatory of Social Conflict, in 2019 there were some 16,739 protests in Venezuela. The figure dropped to 9,633 in 2020 and continued to fall to 6,560 in 2021.
Several factors played a role in this decline, ranging from an apparent weakening of the opposition forces, to the limitations on mobility derived from the covid-19 pandemic, among many others.
Pablo Zambrano, from Fetrasalud, assures that the unions remained mobilized all this time, but recognizes that the recent impulse taken by the protests has to do with some recent changes.
He points out that the workers are not satisfied because the ONAPRE instructions that curtail their labor rights are being applied to them and that, to make matters worse, the government’s response to the claim has been the persecution, intimidation and criminalization of workers. the protests.
“It has also generated discontent that the government has been talking about economic recovery, but that is not felt among the workers. It could be for a sector that in some way will represent 10% of the population and that is part of all these elites that have become built now within this government, but the workers, the wage earners at this time do not have enough to live with dignity, they do not have enough to support their families,” he points out.
Zambrano assures that a key element in the reactivation of the protests has been the fact that the health and education sectors have joined forces to jointly promote the protests, but also that what they demand are concrete responses from the government to the demands of the workers, without other flags.
“We managed to get the workers to respond to the claim, even beyond the party, beyond the ideology, beyond the debate on capitalism, communism, the left or the right – those discourses that are already exhausted -. That here in this moment is over. Regardless of their thoughts, people know that the government is doing it wrong, they know that it is making blunders and that it has a policy that goes against the working class and the Venezuelan working class,” he says.
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BBC-NEWS-SRC: https://www.bbc.com/mundo/noticias-america-latina-62613543, IMPORTING DATE: 2022-08-23 11:30:05
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