Venezuela has long teetered on the edge of collapse, with prices spiraling and jobs vanishing. Grocery shoppers find shelves stripped bare of basics like diapers and detergent, and rationed goods handed out only on designated days. Rents have skyrocketed and the social safety net is in tatters. Reductions in foreign aid, U.S. sanctions, and reduced state subsidies have made everyday necessities unaffordable for the estimated 80% of residents living in poverty.
Nicolás Maduro’s policies — price controls, subsidies, and state-run industries – were supposed to protect the poor but, without strong institutions or transparency, citizens have instead faced shortages, inefficiency, and runaway inflation. Dependence on oil made the economy fragile and capital fled, leaving ordinary people scrambling to survive amid rampant corruption and mismanagement.
It’s a condition many Americans know all too well, if not to the same crunching degree: the stress of rising costs and a lack of living wages and adequate safety net, magnified to a breaking point.
Venezuelan workers have taken to the streets to protest “hunger and misery,” decrying extremely low pay — the national minimum wage sits at just $1.48 a month — even after the government announced small increases that barely made a dent in the rising cost of living. Unfortunately, formal employment opportunities have become so hard to come by that half of the population has been pushed into informal, precarious self‑employment.
This situation is not lost on global companies looking for cheap labor.
In Empire of AI, Karen Hao reveals a contradiction at the heart of Silicon Valley’s utopian visions. The industry promises a future liberated from tedious labor, yet the AI boom has been built on the backs of a global workforce earning low wages under unstable conditions. Venezuelan workers have been central to this system, completing micro-tasks like image labeling, video tagging, content moderation, and data categorization.
Highly educated Venezuelans have turned to platforms like Appen and Remotasks, the middlemen for Silicon Valley giants like OpenAI, Google, Meta, and Microsoft, often making pennies per task, under the constant threat of competition with workers worldwide. There are no benefits, no guaranteed hours. The pay is low, but the mental strain often enormous, and not just from the precariousness and monotony of the tasks – these invisible “ghost workers,” as they’ve been called, are sometimes required to view explicit and gruesome material while doing content moderation work.
These are precisely the kinds of jobs labor economist Nadia Garbellini warned would accompany the AI boom: low-paid, gig-based, insecure work that quietly keeps the technology machine running, leaving workers in a constant state of stress. The problem is structural: tech companies habitually profit from global inequality and weak labor protections, turning human effort into fuel for AI.
And now even these horrible jobs are hard to come by in Venezuela. Hao documents how Big Tech firms often exploit workers in one region, then abruptly move on to continue the exploitation elsewhere, avoiding complaints and demands for better conditions. As generative AI improves at producing its own training data, companies are also cutting back on simpler tasks and shifting to more specialized evaluation work, leaving fewer, even less reliable opportunities.
With Maduro gone and the U.S. apparently resolved to “rebuild” the country, it’s the workers who will feel the pain first. Locking up a dictator doesn’t suddenly fix hyperinflation, inequality, or crumbling public services. Without strong local leadership, workers will keep facing shortages, unrest, and economic uncertainty. What they truly need are reforms that create real jobs, protect their rights, and invest in the people who keep the country running.
Wall Street is cheering the U.S. capture of Maduro mainly because it could open Venezuela’s oil sector to American companies, boosting energy stocks and bonds, though investors remain cautious about the country’s political instability. INET research director Thomas Ferguson has pointed out that in today’s economies, big corporate money dominates, leaving ordinary workers sidelined. In Venezuela, this means that despite vast oil wealth and foreign investment, profits flow to elites while labor protections and livelihoods are ignored.
Oil giants like Chevron, ExxonMobil, and ConocoPhillips may pour investment into Venezuela, but history shows that capital alone doesn’t lift workers out of precarity. Jobs may appear, yet Venezuelan workers risk swapping one form of exploitation for another. And they know what can happen when they push back: after the December 2002 oil strike, PDVSA, Venezuela’s state-owned oil company, fired over 18,000 workers and blacklisted them from returning to the industry, targeting anyone who had exercised their right to strike. Human Rights Watch documented how these actions violated labor rights and crushed union activity, leaving thousands of skilled workers locked out for years and exposing the deep precarity built into Venezuela’s oil sector.
In recent years, Venezuelan oil workers have protested pitiful pay — sometimes as little as $100–$200 a month— and the loss of health benefits, while top managers remain insulated. These protests highlight just how badly labor conditions have deteriorated and underscore that without systemic protections, investment often benefits the few at the expense of the many.
In short, Venezuela’s crisis reflects a global system that favors capital over people. Economist Servaas Storm’s INET research on oil futures markets and global macroeconomics helps explain the country’s crisis: reliance on oil and exposure to volatile markets amplify economic shocks, weaken institutions, and leave workers vulnerable while profits flow to investors rather than supporting the domestic economy. Meanwhile Juan M. Graña, in his INET analysis of wage stagnation in Latin America, adds that structural shifts in global markets and corporate strategies have weakened labor share and depressed wages across the region, shedding light on why Venezuelan workers remain exposed despite natural resources and foreign investment.
Economist and business historian William Lazonick has long warned that many modern corporations are designed to capture value at workers’ expense. In his view, all the utopian rhetoric in the world means little if corporate governance remains focused on shareholder payouts, especially stock buybacks, rather than reinvestment in workers. The AI giants fit this pattern, as do oil multinationals. These companies profit from labor-intensive work that too often offers little pay, security, or long-term opportunity, a clear example of what Lazonick calls a “profits over people” system. In Venezuela, this model leaves workers particularly exposed and underscores the need for reforms that ensure those who generate wealth actually share in it.
In Venezuela, real human beings have been powering global wealth while their own survival hangs by a thread. The situation exposes the global systems shaping everyone’s own lives, Americans included: extractive corporations and tech platforms influence wages, labor protections, and job security everywhere. Gig work, automation, and wage stagnation are not accidents, but the predictable outcome of a system where capital moves freely across borders, and workers’ rights are consistently deprioritized.
Venezuela’s crisis highlights an important lesson: strong labor protections and resilient public institutions are not obstacles to growth, but the foundation that allows markets to work for people rather than against them.
