Tag: Venezuela

Worker Cooperatives in Venezuela

The Venezuela worker cooperative sector has been boom and bust since 2000, catalyzed by the 2001 Special Law of Cooperatives, and fading as the government shifted its support to a more communal form, empresas de producción social. 

Oscar Bastidas offered an early warning that the surge of registered cooperatives lacked values, principles, and economic foundations, and more recently remarked that the country set world records with both the most cooperatives registered (from fewer than 1,000 in 1998 to over 400,000 by 2014) and the largest graveyard of cooperatives with only 20,000 surviving in 2022. Other early reviews accepted a certain level of fraud and failure alongside the ideals of the larger revolutionary effort in economic development. 

Dario Azzelini and Oliver Ressler looked at the shop floor level to understand worker’s experience in a documentary profiling five worker controlled factories: 

By Hugo Chavez’ second presidential term more writers were starting to question the effectiveness of the cooperative strategy, including Camila Piñeiro Harnecker who found the companies were struggling to operate profitably and were not well connected to each other. 

Over time individual cooperative experience was often overshadowed by larger questions of state strategy and the role of unions.      

In more recent years with state support largely gone, some cooperative success stories have been profiled, including some that started before 2000 and have weathered dramatic economic changes. 

Barrios – Industria petrolera y cooperativas (2021)

Froilán Barrios’ 2021 book Industria petrolera y cooperativas en el socialismo del siglo XXI en Venezuela is a methodical analysis of the state-led rise of worker cooperatives in the Venezuelan petroleum industry. Barrios mentions larger problems: that 70% of the 300,000 Chavez-era worker cooperatives were phantom entities that never operated, and that many that did launch were fraudulent pseudo-cooperatives. But his real focus is on evaluating whether the experiences of actual worker co-ops in the petroleum sector – including divers, taxi drivers, and others that contracted with the state oil company PDVSA – were positive.

While outcomes varied, generally he shows that the “twentieth century socialism” label obscured familiar neoliberal trends. The preferential contracts offered to cooperatives functioned as a form of outsourcing that evaded labor laws, reduced union protections, reduced pay, reduced safety training, and blocked access to social security. “…los resultados significaron una oportunidad perdida para el cooperativismo en nuestro país, ya que derivó en flexibilización y precarización laboral en lugar de trabajo digno.”

Find the book on Amazon
Read a version as Barrios’ doctoral thesis on Academia

Schujman – Las Cooperativas de Trabajo en América Latina (2015)

Mario Schujman’s 900-page compendium from 2015, Las Cooperativas de Trabajo en América Latina, focuses its first 300 pages on Argentina,  and then offers a survey of readings from Brazil, Costa Rica, Colombia, Cuba, Ecuador, Mexico, Paraguay, Uruguay, and Venezuela.  

In the introduction José Orbaicetta of CICOPA and FECOTRA celebrates Argentinian worker co-ops and social co-ops, condemns fraudulent pseudo-cooperatives, urges partnership with government and universities to resist economic imperialism, and emphasizes political organizing within solidarity federations.