Tripartite Agreement and social dialog in Venezuela, 1997

The Tripartite Agreement on Integral Social Security and Salary Policy (ATSSI), constituted in 1997 through social dialog among the Venezuelan State, the employers sector and the main labor unions in the country, had among its central objectives on one hand, to modify the regime of calculating social benefits (seniority) and on the other hand, transform the social security system within the framework of a program of a neoliberal structural type, impelled by Rafael Caldera in his second presidency, called Agenda Venezuela. From this arrangement, a set of legal instruments arose whose purpose was to optimize and harmonize the social relations of material production, starting by configuring a consensus between the socio-political and economic actors in the same. From the hermeneutic-dialectic method viewpoint, which provides a relational perspective of historical reality, functions of the diverse actors who are protagonists in this social dialog are analyzed in order to interpret their sectorial roles on a par with their specific political and ideological positions. Concretely, the contributions and contradictions of ATSSI that gave life to the legal instruments are examined at the same time as the objective political conditions that made their realization possible. Conclusions are that social dialog is a fundamental democratic tool for co-existence and all the actors and sectors that constitute the national productive apparatus, whose central function is to harmonize the multiplicity of individual and collective interests to benefit the nation, should develop in an integral manner. Adapted from the source document.