EC Papers September 2018

Venezuela Trip 16th – 21 st July 2018

A REPORT ON OUR RECENT VISIT TO VENEZUELA

ON BEHALF OF THE GENERAL FEDERATION OF TRADE UNIONS

* Items marked in red I am unsure about. I feel the tense should be one way throughout the

report, but first person doesn’t seem right as there are two of us. Second person maybe?

Earlier this year in April, Nicole and I were very fortunate to be nominated by our fellow

young worker colleagues at the GFTU Youth Festival to represent them, our own unions and

the GFTU on an international study trip to Caracas. The aim was to gain a deeper

appreciation of the social movement currently in progress in Venezuela. The trip was

originally planned to be a week long but due to unfortunate cancellations by Air France it

was reduced to just five days, the aim of this report is to illustrate some of the experiences

we were honoured to have and to extend our appreciation to the GFTU for making such a

trip possible.

We arrived in the evening of Monday 16 th August and enjoyed a forty-minute car journey

from the coastal airport through the mountains heading to our hotels in downtown Caracas.

We immediately noticed what a beautifully diverse country Venezuela was, and it was unlike

anything we had ever witnessed before, with small clusters of very basic houses perched

high up on the lush, green mountain side. Before we knew it, we had arrived at a very grand,

yet basic by western standards, hotel called Gran Melia Caracas. Due to the limited time we

had in the country it was important to hit the ground running to fit as much as possible into

our schedule!

Our first day was a real eye opener into the standards of living many Venezuelans

experience with high traffic density, congestion and poor road networks. We started with a

meeting with the President of the FBTTT at their headquarters. The FBTTT is the Federation

of Bolivian Workers in transport and is tied with the IFT (International Transport Workers

Federation) and is a combination of all the unions associated with travel in Venezuela. The

current President of Venezuela Nicol á s Maduro was a member and rep in this union! We

had a short Q&A session where we discussed the structure of the union and how they

organise themselves to be as effective for their members as possible when it comes to

negotiating for workers rights up to a governmental level. We found found that due to the

economical and humanitarian crisis in the country, the current projects include workplace

committees who are elected to ensure that factories and factory owners are producing goods

and ensuring those are distributed in the normal market, instead of being held or going to the

black market. It was very interesting and, in many respects, like the process adopted by the