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ITF regional secretary Antonio Fritz and deputy regional secretary Edgar Diaz held a seminar in Caracas on 29-31 March with the Federación Bolivariana de Trabajadores y Trabajadoras del Transporte (FBTTT) to boost organising in all transport sectors. The FBTTT aims to grow union membership and win more collective bargaining agreements, which give workers a fairer deal. The outcome of the seminar will be a FBTTT strategy for growth among its member unions.
Thirty participants discussed the challenges of organising in Venezuela and unions’ responses – including the merger of small unions to create stronger national industrial unions, and organising at national level across the transport industry in order to defend workers’ rights and improve wages and living conditions. They also highlighted the need to strengthen the relationship between workers and their union representatives.
The ITF representatives stressed the importance of union education to raise worker awareness, develop stronger organising skills and campaigns, improve unions’ negotiating strength, and empower union leaders. They also emphasised the need to strengthen the links between transport unions and boost international solidarity.
Esteban Barboza, president of the Sindicato Nacional de Trabajadores de Rama, Servicios de la Industria del Transporte y Logistica de Colombia (SNTT), described the advances his unions had achieved in Colombia’s transport sector, to inspire his colleagues in Venezuela.
Speaking at the conclusion of the seminar, Antonio Fritz said: “The ITF has long worked with our Venezuelan brothers and sisters, and the FBTTT was founded in order to properly organise transport workers nationwide. The lack of unions and collective agreements have resulted in some abuses by employers – today some of them are reducing, thanks to the FBTTT. We are happy to see that they have been able to improve the lives and working conditions of thousands of workers, and we support them in all they still have to do.”
FBTTT president Francisco Torrealba commented that Venezuela had an excellent and revolutionary labour law, thanks to the legacy of Hugo Chavez, but that strong unions were needed to organise workers and demand enforcement of the law. He added that strong unions were needed in all companies to defend workers’ rights and that in the past four years, FBTTT had grown its transport worker membership from 5,000 to almost 20,000, and that several agreements were being negotiated. Now that Venezuela had a worker as president, he concluded, organised workers were the only people who could defend the country’s future.