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Venezuela Orders Opposition Lawmakers to Pay Workers

  • National Assembly of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela.

    National Assembly of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. | Photo: AVN

Published 20 January 2017
Opinion

Public sector employees are now on track to receive payment of their salaries. 

Venezuela’s Supreme Tribunal of Justice (TSJ) ordered the opposition-controlled National Assembly (AN) on Thursday to pay public sector workers wages owed to them.

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Over 4,000 full-time workers and part-time contractors brought their case to the TSJ, claiming the AN has not paid their salaries in months. The TSJ, the country’s highest court of law, immediately ruled in favor of the plaintiffs. 

“The Chamber warned the AN has in recent months been creating situations of contempt, and breaches of the constitutional order that have affected… the protection of fundamental rights of its workers,” the TSJ said in a statement. 

Public sector workers are now on track to receive payment of their salaries on time, according to wage protections granted to them in the country’s constitution. Venezuela has a higher number of constitutional articles providing protections for government employees than most other Latin American countries. 

The spat between the TSJ and the AN over unpaid wages reflects the increasingly tense relationship between both governmental bodies. The former is largely dominated by supporters of the Bolivarian Revolution and the latter is controlled by the right-wing opposition. 

During the 2015 National Assembly election, the Democratic Unity Roundtable (MUD) won 109 of the 164 general seats, allowing the opposition group to take control of the country’s legislative branch. The Great Patriotic Pole (GPP), the coalition of left-wing parties supportive of the Bolivarian Revolution, were left in the minority with 55 seats. 

Venezuelan historian and scholar Miguel Tinker Salas believes the opposition-led AN is acting as a barrier to all of the progress made by the Bolivarian Revolution since 1999. 

“We have seen in the National Assembly they’ve tried to create situations of ungovernability, but I believe we need to seek governing conditions,” Tinker Salas told teleSUR earlier this month.

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"That has always been the dynamics of the opposition in Venezuela.”

The MUD was founded in 2008 in an attempt to unify opposition parties against the administration of former president Hugo Chávez. The GPP was founded in 2011 by sixteen left-wing parties as a response to the burgeoning opposition. 

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