MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Venezuelan workers demand better salaries

“It is exploitation by the government,” Zambrano insisted.

Venezuelan workers Wednesday took to the streets Wednesday to demand a change in the country's policies together with better pay for them and their families.

The demonstrators chanted “down with [President] Nicolás [Maduro], a decent salary now,” while waving the Venezuelan flag.

Caracas Teachers' Union leader Edgar Machado said the goal was to “demand decent wages for all workers, active and retired because we are living a very complicated situation and the little we earn is barely enough to live a week.”

“A hungry teacher can't teach and a hungry student can't learn,” he added as he highlighted that the basic food basket in October stood at US $ 800 while “a teacher earns less than 3 dollars a month,” he insisted.

“We request an increase which allows us to feed ourselves and support our family nucleus. We demand that the Minister of Education Yelitze Santaella sits down with the Federations to discuss the increase,” Machado stressed. “We hope that this discussion will begin,“ he went on.

The union leader also pointed out schools lack water, which is essential to fight COVID-19, while teachers must provide for their biosecurity kits. ”The teacher is subsidizing the state,“ he said.

“In the next few hours we will announce the next actions,” Machado warned. “There are many reasons we have to be in the streets, and now that we are united with other sectors we will continue,” he went on.

Pablo Zambrano of the Federation of Health Workers said that “we want to work and get paid so that that allows us to live with dignity. So Maduro has to find a way out of the problem of the salary of Venezuelan workers.”

”Venezuelan workers cannot continue working for 7 bolivars (US $ 1.5) a month. It is exploitation by the government,“ Zambrano insisted.

He also criticized the suspension of negotiations between the government and the opposition in Mexico, where social issues had been added to the bargaining table. ”The most important problems of a country have to be the problems of the people, hunger, the misery that is being experienced. A solution has to be found,“ he said. ”It cannot be that a teacher has collected the aguinaldos (yearly bonus) and they barely last a week,” he added.