PDVSA’s Privatization Plans Come with Mass Layoffs and Forced Retirements

Photo credit: Laclase.info

Last week, the Presidency and Executive Direction of Human Resources of PDVSA issued a communication to different shops and bodies affiliated with the state oil company soliciting an assessment of the real situation of the corporation’s labour force, along with the workers’ control records.

This management audit includes two big questions and five specific items in order to identify workers who take absences from their workplace, whether or not on medical leave, and thus begin a process of layoffs and forced retirements.

The action by PDVSA authorities takes part in the ongoing privatization plans that we have denounced from the Classist, Unitary, Revolutionary and Autonomous Current (C-CURA) with actions and declarations of our trade union leaders José Bodas and Fran Luna, executive secretaries of the Unitary Federation of Oil Workers of Venezuela (FUPTV).

PDVSA’s President, Major General Manuel Quevedo, seeks to promote the reduction of the state oil industry’s personnel with a systematic policy of mass layoffs and forced retirements, to benefit transnational capitals like Chevron, Eni, Repsol, Rosneft and CNPC, who seek to fully take ownership of the oil operations and fixed capital of the Joint Ventures under the Maduro government’s privatization plans.

The systematic policies of mass layoffs and forced retirements in PDVSA add up with the consequences of Maduro’s anti-worker adjustment on the life and labor conditions of the oil sector working class, which already suffers hunger wages, the violation to collective bargaining agreements, the closure of the corporation’s health insurance administrator SICOPROSA, the decay of the mess-hall services, the lack of work tools and attire, and the political and labor repression of those who struggle.

At C-CURA, we are convinced that to revert the ongoing situation, and to defeat the plans to privatize the oil industry that belongs to the Venezuelan people, we need workers’ and popular struggle and mobilization, independent both from the Maduro government and the bosses’ opposition, which subordinated to the United States’ government, only knows how to de-mobilize to bargain while awaiting a military coup or an imperialist armed intervention.