Venezuela´s Guayana Union Workers are hopping mad

Over ten thousand unionized workers have been  on strike at Sidor, a state owned company in Venezuela´s Guayana province. They claim their union´s agreement with the owners expired  four years ago, and the government is trying to stall negotiations as inflation eats their earnings.

Sidor steel workers holding march to protest government abuse

Sidor workers  published an open letter to the population, which they distributed, and also got onto aporrea´s main webpage. Aporrea is a communist run website which lately has been very critical of the Maduro regime.

In this letter the union workers claim the government is lying about their motives, has treated them in an insulting fashion, abuses them by not raising their wages, and that production at the plants dropped due to electricity shortages and not because they are lazy.

Graph shows the nature of the electricity crisis in Venezuela. 

The red curve is the delivered energy, the blue curve is 

the demand. The green curve is the installed capacity. 

To drop from the green to the red the government owned

 generation company neglected maintenance. The increase was

 due to higher population and the rising GDP due to higher

 oil prices. The dip in the blue curve labeled with the word 

DEFICIT is the  point in time when the Guayana plants 

(Sidor and others) were forced to drop production due to 

lack of electricity. 

The union workers  also claim that the Maduro  government is trying to avoid signing the new labor agreement because they want to hand over the steel plants to the Chinese, and the Chinese company (Minmetals)  wants  low wage non  union labor they can exploit like they do in China. 

Minmetals exect celebrating contract between 

Chile´s state owned Codelco and his company