Mérida, June 13, 2008 (venezuelanalysis.com)
Contract workers from Venezuela’s recently nationalized SIDOR steel plant were declared permanent workers and incorporated into the United Steel Industry Workers Union (SUTISS) Tuesday, in accordance with the collective contract that SUTISS signed with the government in early May, following 16 months of embattled negotiations with the previous private management.
“We have placed one more stone in the construction of a world model of Socialism of the 21st Century,” President Hugo Chávez declared during the ceremony in the Miraflores presidential palace in Caracas. An initial group of 216 contract workers were incorporated into the collective contract Tuesday, out of a total of 1,248 who are on track to obtain permanent status in a gradual process laid out in clause 97 of the contract.
Chávez announced that the new SIDOR will become a “socialist” enterprise run by the government together with the workers. “This is an historic day, on which the working class continues converting itself into the vanguard of the Venezuelan people and the Bolivarian Revolution,” the president boasted.Chávez also called on the SIDOR workers, who are now seasoned revolutionary organizers, to help make the plant function like a “socialist worker school” for the rest of Venezuela. SUTISS General Secretary José “Acarigua” Rodríguez assured during the ceremony that the union will be fully committed to the government’s national development plans.
“We are profoundly convinced that we should join forces, the workers and the government, to move this industry forward,” Rodríguez remarked.However, the union leader was adamant about the need to “deepen the participation of the workers” in the overall management of the plant during its “process of transition” in which “the emancipation of the working class from savage neo-liberal capitalism and imperialism is underway.”
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