The National Telecommunications Commission (CONATEL) has expanded its core duties into supporting the State’s repression apparatus by monitoring what Venezuelans say on social media, among other things. But as CONATEL tries to do too much at once, its workers are feeling the strain. On Wednesday, CONATEL employees organized an impromptu protest right in front of the agency’s main offices to…
A few years ago I was invited to write the first OpEd piece of my life by the Venezuelan newspaper El Globo. I was in graduate school at the time, immersed in trying to understand economics, and so I wrote a little piece reflecting what seemed to me a self-evident truth: that industrial policies are the pits.…
“It used to be simple,” my friend Armando is telling me. “I used to be able to play around with the shifts depending on the changes in demand. Sometimes, when I had the pizzeria, there were two good days followed by three bad days. Knowing those were coming, I could ask my guys to either…
Isolation has become the keyword in Venezuela: the heavy debt owed by the government to foreign companies, from airlines to credit card companies and any number of service providers are causing serious problems to both the country’s economy and its reputation. The telecom sector is no different, as national postal service Ipostel has put on hold all…
After four years without a salary increase, the workers of the Foreign Affairs Ministry (MPPRE) said “enough!” this week and staged a loud protest outside the Ministry’s Administrative Building in Caracas. What was the response from the higher ranks? Here’s a video of Human Resources Director Yajumari González, who descended from her office to give…
All kinds of very strange stories have been circulating about the situation in the SOE-Hearland of Ciudad Guayana, where a SIDOR strike that’s about to enter its third week is being joined by restive Ferrominera workers, amid an industrial relations climate that seems to be hitting an all-time low. Andres Velásquez’s twitter TL suggests the…
Reading this story about how close we are to a collapse in our ports, about how there are 434 thousand tons of food waiting to be unloaded, about how there aren’t enough trucks to haul all this stuff around, and about how dock workers are going to be asked to work on Sundays, makes me…
