‘No More Blood for Oil’: Global Labor Movement Opposes Trump’s Attacks on Venezuela

Labor federations around the world are condemning the Trump administration’s acts of war in Venezuela.

In a raw display of imperialist aggression, the United States bombed the country, kidnapped its president and his wife, and imprisoned them in New York City on January 4. Special forces and military aircraft killed 80 civilians and military personnel.

“We join the international labor community in condemning President Trump’s unconstitutional actions in Venezuela,” said the main U.S. labor federation, the AFL-CIO, in a social media post.

It linked to a joint statement from the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) and the Trade Union Confederation of the Americas (TUCA). The World Federation of Trade Unions has also condemned the attacks, as have unions from Greece to South Africa to Nepal to the Czech Republic.

“These acts in no way defend democracy; they are clear acts of aggression as part of a militarised foreign policy agenda motivated by unilateral economic interests,”said ITUC General Secretary Luc Triangle in the statement. “Threats of kidnapping and the misuse of the courts to attack a sovereign government undermine the international rule of law and set a precedent of imperial coercion that jeopardises peace everywhere.”

The indictment against ousted president Nicolás Maduro is on drug charges, though the Department of Justice has removed from its indictment the claim that he led a made-up criminal organization known as the “Cartel de los Soles.”

But Trump has been blunt about his economic motives. He declared that the U.S. would “run” Venezuela to juice the country’s natural resources for the benefit of oil companies, and to extract rare-earth minerals used in consumer electronics and vehicle manufacturing, in competition with China. He reasserted the U.S.’s dominance over Latin America and the Western Hemisphere as its colonial sphere of influence, rebranding the 19th-century Monroe Doctrineas “the Don-roe Doctrine.”

“We defend Venezuela and all of Latin America as a territory of peace,” ITUC and TUCA said in their joint statement. “We do not accept invasion and violence against our peoples and territories. The trade union movement, as always, is on the front line of defending sovereignty and self-determination, democracy and human rights.”

WARNING SIGNS: MIGHT MAKES RIGHT

A handful of U.S. unions were already worried about a rush to war. For months the Trump administration has been bombing speedboats off the Venezuelan coast, extrajudicially killing at least 100 people, accusing them without evidence of smuggling drugs.

“I think we’re just gonna kill people,” Trump said in October, brushing off the need for congressional authority to attack Venezuela and blow up these boats. “Okay? We’re gonna kill them.”

Last month, delegates of the Professional Staff Congress (PSC), representing 30,000 faculty and staff of the City University of New York (CUNY), passed a resolution opposing U.S. aggression against Venezuela. The resolution points out that military action “diverts desperately needed funds from education, health care, housing, infrastructure, and other social needs at a time when CUNY remains chronically underfunded.”

“The use of the U.S. military to carry out lethal attacks on fishing boats and seize oil tankers amounts to simple murder and piracy,” said the United Electrical Workers in a December statement headlined No More Blood for Oil. “We demand that our government immediately cease these attacks, and that Congress exercise its power to reign in this overreach by the executive branch.”

The threat is global. “Nobody’s going to fight the United States militarily over the future of Greenland,” Stephen Miller, a top Trump aide told CNN. “We live in a world…that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power.”

BILLIONAIRE WAR ON WORKERS

Cuban-American war hawk and Secretary of State Marco Rubio wants the theater of war to expand to Cuba. “I don’t think it’s any mystery that we are not big fans of the Cuban regime, who, by the way, are the ones that were propping up Maduro,” Rubio told NBC News’ “Meet the Press,” adding that he thinks “they’re in a lot of trouble.”

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Others in the Trump administration have threatened military attacks against Colombia, Mexico, and Iran, including a possible takeover of Greenland. The New York Times reported last December that the militarized pressure campaign on Maduro has brought together various factions within the administration to fulfill their ideological aims.

Meanwhile, “Trump and the Republicans have spent the past year openly waging war on working-class people here at home,” said a statement from National Nurses United, the largest U.S. union of registered nurses, “gutting Medicaid, refusing to extend Affordable Care Act subsidies that keep our patients’ premiums from skyrocketing.”

What’s more, the Trump administration is withholding $10 billion in funding for child care subsidies, social services, and cash support for low-income families across five states led by Democrats. It’s charging without evidence widespread fraud in California, Colorado, Illinois, New York, and Minnesota, where a fraud scandal has been weaponized by Trump’s Department of Justice to attack Somali immigrants as possessing inherently criminal tendencies.

(On January 7, as we were going to press, an ICE agent in Minneapolis murdered 37-year-old Renee Nicole Good. According to people who knew her, she was defending her immigrant neighbors amid the deployment of 2,000 federal agents to the Twin Cities. The heinous state-sanctioned murder happened miles from where George Floyd was killed by police in 2020.)

United Auto Workers Local 4811, representing 48,000 University of California grad student workers, said the attacks “will benefit only the billionaire class” and demanded that funding be redirected from bombers to education and health care.

The San Francisco Labor Council passed a resolution declaring itself a “Peace Labor Council.”

“We cannot have peace as long as oil and corporate interests rule our politics,” said UAW Region 9A Director Brandon Mancilla. “The same interests that want to run Venezuela and reclaim the nation’s oil profits are the same that keep us working longer hours for less pay, with no health care, and little retirement and job security. We need to prioritize addressing the crisis of poverty and inequality at home, instead of threatening to destabilize countries abroad.”

The May Day Strong Coalition, a group of unions and community organizations organizing against Trump’s billionaire agenda, echoed the anti-war sentiment.

“Millions are losing health care coverage, grocery prices are rising and we can’t pay our rent, but Trump would rather occupy Venezuela for big oil,” said an email from May Day Strong, sharing a petition for workers to write to Congress to say no to war. Under the banner of support occupation and pay, the coalition is organizing protests at Chevron and Citgo gas stations nationwide, hitting the pocketbooks of billionaire oil tycoons Tim Dunn and Paul Singer. Here’s how to get an event off the ground for January 10.

But following Good's murder by ICE, May Day Strong is linking the struggles against the war at home and abroad. From Caracas to Minneapolis, militarized aggression is unifying the opposition to billionaires and their authoritarian impunity. “The Trump regime is seizing control of the mineral and energy wealth of Venezuela and handing it over to Big Oil,” wrote May Day Strong in an email. “DHS Secretary Kristi Noem’s ICE militia is attacking our communities while enriching private prison corporations and the Silicon Valley companies that sell Trump surveillance tech.”

ORGANIZING VS. THE WAR MACHINE

It will take mass organizing if we have any hope of grinding the war machine to a halt. People marched in Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, and many other cities on January 4 and 5, joining up with protestors in other countries.

During the 2003 invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq, U.S. Labor Against the War organized opposition, building international links between workers in Iraq and the U.S. Today, pressure could build on efforts of the National Labor Network for a Ceasefire, which over the past couple of years has brought together national unions representing millions of workers to call for an end to Israel’s genocidal war against Palestinians with U.S. arms.

“Remember, today it is us, tomorrow it could be any other nation on the planet,” said the executive committee of the Bolivarian National Union of Postal Workers of Venezuela in a statement. “We expect your solidarity, mobilization, and international support so that, with renewed determination, we can continue fighting the most genocidal empire in the history of humankind.”

Sign the May Day Strong letter to Congress condemning the attack on Venezuela here
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