Venezuela - April 22 2022

Towards May Day, 2022...

Stand with the Venezuelan working class and the entire Latin American working class against the capitalists, imperialism and their lackey regimes!!

The industrial workers return to combat in the midst of the catastrophe and the attack imposed on them by the swindle of the "Bolivarian revolution"

LONG LIVE THE STRIKE OF THE SIDOR STEEL WORKERS!
The hierarchs of the regime are already making a pact with the US imperialism to plunder the oil while they are starving the people. Enough is enough!

GENERAL STRIKE!

Since Monday, April 18, the workers of the huge steel mill Sidor have been staging a real rebellion, tired of poverty wages, of the destruction of their collective bargaining agreement and against the repression of Maduro's starving government.
This struggle began with the workers going over the heads of the hated union bureaucracy of the SUTISS and the FBT, voting in assemblies for a sit-down strike in 14 sectors of the plant, hot rolling, pellet mill, bars, wire rod, midrex, oxygen plant, billets and slabs, etc. Thus the workers reject the new wage table that the company wants to impose on them and demand that the spreadsheet with its concepts established in the collective bargaining agreements be respected. A departmental delegate from Sidor said: "It is not enough for the government to have taken away our collective bargaining agreements, spreadsheets, wage tables, but with their inventions of a calculation formula they are stealing from the workers. This shows the mafia that exists or the project they have to continue deteriorating the worker and to fix a wage in accordance with the disastrous situation that the government itself has created due to its bad policies".

With the salary increase decreed by the Government, the workers should be earning between Bs. 2000 and 3000 but they are receiving less than 800 bolivars. They also demand the reinstatement of their co-workers qualified as "not required" since March 2020 when a radical quarantine was decreed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. They are paid less than those who are working.

The Governmet is trying to intimidate the workers with the National Guard, the SEBIN and other repressive forces and harassing them with vehicles of the General Directorate of Military Counterintelligence (DGCIM) in the pellet plant area, but the workers are standing firm.
The workers, fed up with being cheated, have thrown the plant president Néstor Astudillo out of the plant, who went to the billet sector to try to negotiate.

"As Astudillo arrived, he left. He offered a bonus of 500 and one thousand bolivars to be paid on April 30, but we workers did not accept because that is not included in the salary. Besides, he said that the bag of food that they deliver with the chickens and mortadella are part of the salary", said a worker of the steel plant.

For this Wednesday, April 20, an assembly of workers had also been called at gate III. The company management prevented the meeting by diverting the fleet of buses that would transport the 7:00 am to 3:00 pm shift to gate IV.

The workers are also fighting against the scabs that the company and the government are trying to bring in buses to the plants to try to break the strike. These have been courageously expelled by the workers. But this heroic struggle continues and has already won over broad sectors of the industrial region of Guayana, which concentrates the Iron and Steel Complex in Puerto Ordaz, and dozens of plants belonging to the Corporación Venezolana de Guayana (CVG). From the CASIMA plant, the solidarity of the workers has already arrived.
The catastrophe in Venezuela is the result of the "Socialism of the 21st century" proposed by the swindlers of the "Bolivarian revolution" and the traitors of the reformist left who called to gather votes by telling the exploited that these governments are "friends of the peoples", but what they left behind is a deep misery for the working masses, 6 million fleeing the country because of hunger and wandering around the continent, looking for a more dignified future for their families, and the SIDOR workers collecting their wages with chicken and mortadella, scum!

Imperialism used Chavismo, its partner in thousands of business deals in the U.S., as a squeezed lemon and it threw the whole crisis to the working class, doing everything the right wing could not do. Thus, dressing up as "anti-imperialists" to deceive the masses, they left Latin America tied with triple chains to imperialism.
Today the "anti-imperialist" Maduro, unconditional lackey and kneeling to Wall Street and the oil transnationals, rubs his hands with the business deals with Biden to deepen the plundering of Venezuelan crude to feed the US imperialism war machine, filling the pockets of the parasites of the Bolivarian bourgeoisie with hard dollars that are kept in tax havens and the banks of the capitalist pirates and filibusters. As the exploited of the Middle East used to say, "While the bourgeois live like kings, the workers live like beggars!"

Against the cowardly native bourgeoisies, partners of imperialism, starving their own people, we must break with the bourgeoisie!
All with the workers of Sidor! Open the road to the working class to lead the poor of the countryside and the city to defeat imperialism!
Towards May Day... For a Latin American continental struggle of the working class together with the workers of SIDOR! There are the forces to break with the IMF and the plunder of the oppressed peoples of Latin America.