http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-chaplin9jul09,0,5822763.story?coll=la-home-headlines
From the Los Angeles Times
The Little Tramp's Classic Labor Lesson
Venezuela's socialist government is using a 1936 Chaplin film to educate
workers about their rights. Employers are not applauding.
By Chris Kraul
Times Staff Writer
July 9, 2006
LOS TEQUES, Venezuela In his classic 1936 film, "Modern Times," Charlie
Chaplin has to work so fast tightening bolts in a steel factory that he
finally goes crazy. In a memorable scene that has become a metaphor for
labor exploitation, the Little Tramp is run through the factory's enormous
gears.
For President Hugo Chavez's socialist government, the film is more than
just entertainment: It's become a teaching tool. Since January, in a bid to
expose the evils of "savage capitalism," the Labor Ministry has shown the
Chaplin film to thousands of workers in places such as this rundown
industrial suburb of Caracas.
When the screenings at factories or meeting halls end, Labor Ministry
officials then take their cue, and use Chaplin's plight to spell out worker
rights under occupational safety laws passed last year and now being
applied. They are part of Chavez's sweeping reform agenda that he calls
Socialism for the 21st Century.
Chaplin wanted his Depression-era movie to make a point, that "once inside
the factory, workers had no meaningful rights," said Los Angeles-based film
historian and Chaplin authority Richard Schickel. "It was very relevant in
the moment it was released, a time of social unrest and the emerging U.S.
labor movement."
Seventy years later, Chaplin's fable is all too relevant in Venezuela, said
several factory workers who saw the film recently.
"The owners still value their machines more than their workers," said
Roberto Maldonado, a 29-year-old minimum-wage worker at the Pollo Premium
poultry plant, which processes 75,000 chickens a day. "Charlie Chaplin ends
up crazy, and I feel that way too sometimes. When I go home, I'm too tired
to pay attention to my wife or family."
Freddy Colmenari, a 35-year-old worker at a pasta factory here, said that
just as Chaplin's bosses do in the film, his supervisors frequently speed
up the assembly line to nerve-racking levels and zealously monitor workers'
trips to the bathroom. "There is always pressure and stress," he said.
But the business community here is hardly applauding the film. In a formal
complaint to Chavez last month, the four main employer associations in
Venezuela said that showing a movie depicting the boss as a "vulgar
exploiter of workers" was designed to "generate hate and resentment in the
labor sector" and "demonize the employer."
An official at the Venezuelan Confederation of Industries, one of the four
signatories, said that the new workplace laws were another example of
Chavez punishing private industry, a process the groups say has been
unrelenting since a failed 2002 coup led by businessman Pedro Carmona.
While insisting they don't oppose workplace safety improvements, business
groups here say that they weren't consulted before the new laws were
drafted and that now workers and their delegates have too much power to
intervene in factory operations.
Jhonny Picone, a top Labor Ministry official, said employees needed all the
power they could get. He noted that Venezuelan workers were more likely to
describe their job as "a curse from God than as something positive."
The grim and dehumanizing factory conditions depicted in the Chaplin film
are still the "norm," he said more than 1,500 workers die and thousands
are injured annually in industrial accidents.
Largely at Picone's insistence, the film has been shown 1,000 times in 14
states and has been effective in educating workers who usually have no clue
about their health and safety rights. Labor Ministry officials say it's
because the most recent workplace regulations, passed in 1986, were
unobserved, a "dead letter."
Workers are told they have a right to demand safety and hygiene
precautions, and, through an employee-elected delegate that represents each
factory, even to shut down production if owners don't comply. Egregious and
repeated safety violations can result in the government taking over a plant.
"With Charlie Chaplin, it's easier to catch the attention of workers who
are often too tired or don't trust the government in the first place," said
Picone, a doctor named by Chavez to head a new Labor Ministry agency that
he compared to the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration.
The workplace laws are a facet of Chavez's often-mentioned goal of
installing a new socialist economic model to replace the globalized
free-market version that the president says has failed.
The "popular economy" model includes a return to state-controlled central
planning that reminds many of the Soviet era. Bankrolled by the country's
oil wealth, Chavez has financed a number of worker-owned cooperatives that
run factories and farms that the government has built or taken over.
"It's by no means dominant yet. It's gradually being built up by a process
of trial and error," said a Chavez administration official who asked not to
be named. "But in the longer term, the popular economy model will be dominant."
But one industrial leader who asked not to be identified said that the
business climate was abysmal, and that factory production, industrial jobs
and private investment had plummeted since Chavez took power in 1999.
"How much of this policy is revolution and how much is castigation, I don't
know," he said.
Critics say Chavez is merely recycling the failed protectionist economic
policies that many South American nations tried to impose after World War
II to keep out foreign capital and competition. The policies were largely
jettisoned in the 1980s as countries began embracing free markets and
foreign investment.
Business interests also cite Chavez's decision to pull Venezuela out of the
Andean Community as another example of his bias against the private sector.
The regional trade group, known as CAN, was too U.S.-dominated, the
president said. But one member, Colombia, is Venezuela's second-largest
trading partner, and businesspeople here are worried that they will lose
tens of millions of dollars in trade as a result.
On Tuesday, Venezuela formally joined the Mercosur trade bloc, whose
members include Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay. Chavez told
delegates in Caracas, Venezuela's capital, that he made the switch to avoid
being "devoured by imperialist strategies, as happened with CAN."
But Venezuelan producers will have a tougher time competing in the Mercosur
arena, said Jose Luis Betancourt, president of Fedecamaras, Venezuela's
largest business chamber.
He criticized the new workplace measures. "The law will only generate less
efficiency, less [industrial] capacity and make the Venezuelan economy more
dependent on high oil prices, which won't last all our lives."
Chavez's adversaries in the business sector scoff at the Chaplin film
screenings as an example of the president's simplistic, outdated and
decidedly business-unfriendly economic policies.
But for poultry plant worker Maldonado, Charlie Chaplin has made a
difference at work.
Inspired by the film and the talk from Labor Ministry officials, he
demanded gloves and soap from his employer and got them. But the assembly
line still goes too fast, he said.
Metalworker Miguel Moreno also has seen some improvement. "We have more
power because we know more," he said. "They've given me earplugs for the
noise, at least."
Film historian Schickel said, "Chaplin would just love that his film is
still relevant to modern social conditions, that a modern-day leftist
politician in Latin America would find this film to be a useful tool."
