The Venezuelan government is fast politicizing the country’s oil and gas industry, now requiring workers to support the socialist revolution of President Hugo Chavez if they plan on keeping their jobs.
“We are convinced that the majority of the working sector in the oil industry supports (Chavez’s socialist) Revolution,” said Oil Minister Rafael Ramirez. “So…we are going to discuss the collective agreement with those revolutionary sectors of oil workers.”
Ramirez was referring to long-delayed talks with oil workers to establish a new 3-year collective bargaining agreement on pay and benefits. And, underscoring the need to be politically correct, he said the negotiations would resume after union elections take place.
Those remarks echo earlier ones in which Ramirez actually said Venezuela’s oil workers will be suspected of conspiring against Chavez’s socialist revolution if they do not join socialist workplace groups.
No counter-revolutionaries
“By now, there should not be a single counter-revolutionary in the heart of our company, our industry,” Ramirez said at a rally with workers taken on by state oil company Petroleos de Venezuela SA after it nationalized dozens of oil service companies earlier this year. “There cannot be a single PDVSA installation where socialist committees do not exist,” said Ramirez, who has long spearheaded Chavez’s drive to bring politics into Venezuela’s main industry.
“Whoever is not in a committee will be suspected of conspiring against the revolution,” the minister said.
According to Ramirez, Venezuela is nearing its target of “liberating” 8,000 oil workers from recently nationalized private companies and hiring them to work for the state-run oil company—under the umbrella of socialism.
Ramirez last week said 6,900 former employees of private local and foreign companies are now on the PDVSA payroll—sending the company payroll to 80,000 workers.
Severe pressure
The figure is nearly double what it was when Chavez took office in 2001, and industry analysts warn that it will put severe pressure on PDVSA’s financial health, especially given the drop in oil prices.
If the Chavez regime has any concerns about that, Ramirez is not the one to ask. “Costs are being reduced in a process that has had no problems,” the minister said.
To keep the public focused away from any such problems, however, the Chavez regime has again raised doubts about the US, saying a recent decision by Washington, DC, to land troops in neighboring Colombia is part of a wider plot. “It’s an act of aggression toward our country,” Ramirez said of the plans that would allow US military personnel to operate from bases in Colombia, which shares a 1,400-mile border with Venezuela. “We are worried about what’s happening,” he said.
“Now that the Yankees want to set up four bases in Colombia…it forces us to review our relations with Colombia,” intoned Chavez.
