Venezuela: CANTV to bring worker pensions in line (with minimum wage)

[Robbien]

CARACAS, Venezuela (AFX) - Venezuelan telecom CANTV said it will bring worker pensions in line with a new minimum wage following recent threats by President Hugo Chavez to nationalize the company.

'CANTV will adjust, starting on Sept. 1, the pensions of retirees that currently sit below the minimum wage,' the company said in a statement that appeared on its Web site late Wednesday. A new minimum wage equivalent to US$238 (euro185) a month goes into effect next month.

The company said it will also continue to pay 100 percent medical coverage for all workers as well as 75 percent of the cost of medicine.

Chavez earlier said he would nationalize the company if it failed to follow an order from the Supreme Court issued last year that favored workers in a long-running pension dispute.

Last year, Venezuela's highest court ordered the telecom to increase more than 3,400 workers' pensions to take into account currency devaluations, inflation and minimum wage hikes since 1999.

http://www.hemscott.com/news/latest-news/item.do?newsId=35847944574670

While here in the US we are passing Pension Reform to help out the company's bottom line to the detriment of the worker.

[1932]

1. who in the world would say adjusting for inflation/currency deval is a bad

thing?

[Robbien]

2. Short answer: GOPers

A nickel in the pocket of a worker is a nickel less in the pocket of the rich elite.

[w4rma]

3. Chavez is Venezuela's President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

I can't see how a government could run any better, more responsive, more efficient than Venezuela's government is being run.

[Vidar]

4. A wonderful way to treat thieving corporations. Viva Chavez!

[Judi Lynn]

5. Adding a Vene. worker-related article: "Big Cooperative Push in Venezuela"

Big Cooperative Push in Venezuela
by Chris Kraul
August 25, 2006

Los Angeles Times Printer Friendly Version
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MARGARITA ISLAND, Venezuela - For 20 years, Eustacio Aguilera's family owned the Hotel Residencia Guaiqueri in this tourist destination and free-trade zone.

He hired the cooks, the maintenance men and the cleaning women. But now when he asks them to prepare a meal or tidy a room, he is careful to treat them collegially. The staff may do menial work, but they are also co- owners.

"Before we had a boss. Now we are the bosses," said Hermogenes Garcia, a longtime maintenance man at the Guaiqueri.

The hotel is among 100,000 cooperatives formed in Venezuela in the last two years that are the centerpiece of President Hugo Chavez's new socialist model to create jobs and redistribute this oil-rich country's wealth. They now employ 7% of the country's workforce, a number that could grow to 30% in a few years, government officials say.
(snip)

Nevertheless, Guaiqueri Hotel owner Aguilera sees mostly the benefits of Chavez's policy. Located near the beach, his hotel was going broke last year and he was faced with the option of either selling or forming a cooperative. He settled on a hybrid form called a co- managed cooperative in which he turned over a 45% interest to workers in exchange for a $500,000 loan to refurbish and remarket the property.
(snip/...)

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=45&ItemID=10825

[Johnyawl]

6. from the article you posted, this caught my eye immediatly

...The government offers cooperatives exemption from all taxes as well as interest-free loans.


In the US our government gives tax breaks and exemptions to Wal-Mart, the country's largest and richest corporation, and lets the little Ma & Pa business go under.

[gorbal]

8. If you read down, the article, some things might tick you off

They don't give another side on the point made below-

But critics say the cooperatives are a replay of policies that already have failed across Latin America. For several decades after World War II, many Latin American nations engaged in state-sponsored economic programs designed to boost local industries and keep out imports.

"The underlying assumption of the program was that the state could do a better job than the private sector, which is inherently self-aggrandizing and doesn't look after the interests of the workers or the broader public," Boston University Professor David Scott Palmer said.

Several nations ended up defaulting on huge loans that they had taken out to finance state-owned industries, generating a hemispheric economic crisis in the early 1980s. The crisis pushed most of Latin America into embracing free-market policies that broke down barriers to imports, foreign investment and privatization of state-run monopolies.

Now, the pendulum is swinging back to the left in countries such as Venezuela whose leaders say free trade hasn't done enough to reduce poverty and inequality.

In a round about way, they make it sound like they are blaming the "economic crisis" on coop's....even if that is not the case.

[David__77]

7. State and collective sectors should be strengthened.

State policy should support these forms of ownership. The broadest economic democracy must be created, with allowance for planning centrally for infrastructure and social needs. This IS a successful economic model, when people are politically conscious and mobilized, and corruption is continually rooted out.