José Guerra.- Reading the essay by the historian José A Olivar, written in 2017, titled The Construction Industry as an Auxiliary Engine for Economic Growth During the Military Dictatorship of 1948-1958, I found a piece of information that seemed important to me. The salary level in 1957 was high in that Venezuela that was experiencing an economic boom. Indeed, according to the document, the average daily construction wage was Bs 20, which was equivalent to US $ 6 per day, while a food industry worker earned Bs 12 that year, that is, US $ 3.5 . It was those wages, among other elements, that led to a migratory flow to Venezuela, which made the country fill with artisans, skilled workers and potential businessmen from a Europe destroyed by the Second World War. Starting in 1940, wages in Venezuela increased steadily as an expression of a rising oil income and a rapidly growing country. For those forties and fifties the dollar was quoted at Bs 3.09. Venezuela had one of the strongest and most stable currencies in the world.
On June 26, 2020, the dollar cost Bs 211,870. If we add the eight zeros that were removed with the two currency conversions of 1998 and 2008, that day one dollar would be equivalent to Bs 21,187,000,000,000 (twenty-one billion one hundred eighty-seven billion). This suggests that the bolívar as a currency is a useless piece. The socialist policies of Chávez and Maduro made the bolivar an object of archeology. As a result of these destructive policies, public sector wages are mainly pulverized. That day the minimum wage was translated into US $ 1.88 per month. In other words, in nominal terms Venezuelan workers in 2020 earn significantly less than what their grandparents earned when the Pérez Jiménez dictatorship.
This is not what the stiped spokesmen and scribes of the dictatorship are talking about. Their speeches, following the Cuban script, always consist of looking for an external enemy to justify the destruction of a nation that they received in 1999 to be governed with the hope of change, which resulted in a monumental failure, like the one at hand. view. Socialism has produced in Venezuela one of the largest confiscations of wealth ever known in universal history. When the decadent time and history, which set designer puts things in their place, the damage caused to a town can be seen in all its dimensions and the names that created such a tragedy will be known and recorded, by action or omission.
The salary in the materialization of the work effort, of the wear and tear of the worker’s life consumed and turned into objects for enjoyment or investment. But it is also the compensation that the worker receives when with his struggles he has obtained a remuneration commensurate with his effort. With all that, socialism ended.
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