When Diana was nationalised, President Hugo Chavez said it should be run by the workers. “It’s not about state capitalism, you all have a vital role to play in terms of worker control, worker self management, socialist worker co-management of companies, it shouldn’t belong to the state, but rather to the people, managed by the workers, not the state. Workers ... who have to be accountable to the people. Worker control is worker control,” he said to the Diana workers.
Diana workers’ spokesperson Ramos stated that if there had been consultation regarding the new management, there wouldn’t be a conflict now.
“We would have begun a dialogue with minister Osorio... he would have made his proposals, we would have made ours, and we would have arrived at an agreement, as the revolutionaries that we are. But a person who has never been to the company, has never visited us, never seen how we work, how our worker control works – that its very successful and is an achievement of the revolution at a national level - ...he comes and imposes someone like that, ignoring the revolutionary process of the last 14 years to organise the people in order to transfer power,” he said.
“The proposal is that the new management comes out of the ranks of the workers [of Diana]. We can send ten names to the minister, and he picks one of them for example, and the [worker] assembly will decide those ten names,” Ramos told Alba Ciudad radio.
“Everyone knows our achievements, our production increase, our creation of new production lines, our expansion of the refinery, our new products. We’ve even been pioneers in the creation of freeware,” Meneses said. Diana uses open source software for its administration.
In a statement from the Diana socialist worker council published on Monday, the workers wrote that “It’s been over five years now that Diana has been under responsible worker control...and almost a month without the presence of management authorities, a situation which hasn’t at all affected productivity and efficiency, showing concretely the effectiveness of the participation of workers in the running of a company”.
On 28 July, Hugo Chavez’s birthday, Diana workers, “as a present for Comandante Chavez”, worked overtime, and beat their production record, Venezuelan journalist Karen Mendez reported.