Following
an intense day of mass mobilizations, which included a concentration in
front of the Brazilian Embassy in Buenos Aires, and after announcing a joint
national strike, the Argentinean Federation of Carbonated Beverages and
Related Industry Workers (FATAGA) and the Truckers’ Union signed an
agreement last night whereby AmBev agreed to all their demands. Thus, the
unions called off the actions they had planned to pressure the company.
Pablo
Quiroga,
FATAGA Institutional Policy secretary, informed Sirel that
“Close to midnight last night, the company decided to forego its plans to
cancel the contracts with the two threatened distributors. As of that
moment, the two organizations that were participating in the mobilization,
the Drivers’ Union and FATAGA, considered that their demands
had been met, and decided to suspend the measures programmed for today,
which included a joint national strike by both unions.”
The
agreement was signed at the Brazilian embassy, before Ambassador
Mauro Vieira, the head of staff of the Ministry of Labor, Norberto
Ciaravino, the president of the company Quilmes, Joao Castro
Neves, and the national representative and lawyer of the union of truck
drivers, Héctor Recalde. “This gives us a pretty good idea of what
this conflict meant for Brazil,” Quiroga remarked.
In his
evaluation, the FATAGA leader said that: “Participation in the
mobilizations was massive, and for today we had planned to close every beer
bottling plant and all the Pepsi Cola plants in the country. This had
a strong impact on management.”
With
respect to the immediate future, Quiroga anticipated that “Now we
will have an impasse, and we expect that the company will review the
strategy it had defined. What will probably happen now, as is customary in
Argentina, is that management will begin a series of talks and
negotiations with the workers, before deciding on any measure that involves
job cuts.”
“I want to
underline -he added- that once again we were able to coordinate perfectly
with our fellow workers at the Truckers’ Union, and the outcome was a
great success. We have been working together for a long time, as we are
jointly involved in numerous companies, they in distribution and we in
production. The results are evident.”
For his
part, Pablo Moyano, the current head of the Truckers’ Union,
said to Sirel that “We have shown once more that the only way to
solve the problems workers face is by mobilizing. The Belgian-Brazilian
management had already sent out 1,000 pink slips, and was planning to fire
another 5,000. It also intended to cut down costs by handling their own
distribution and exploiting truck drivers. They wanted to lay off thousands
of workers from the factories and close down half the distributors in the
country in a single blow.”
Moyano
went over the events leading up to the conflict and recalled how “Labor
negotiated for a month to get management to sign an agreement to prevent
layoffs, but the company would not agree to it. That confirmed that we were
right: that was the plan they had in mind. So we said: No more! We paralyzed
the entire chain, from production -in collaboration with FATAGA- to
the very last truck in the country, and we went straight to the Embassies of
their home countries: Belgium and Brazil. There we showed them
the strength of the labor movement: with 10,000 workers gathered in front of
the Brazilian embassy under the pouring rain. Rank-and-file workers
demonstrated that they were united and that they understood what the unions
were saying.”
In his
assessment of the mobilization held yesterday, Tuesday the 10th,
Moyano stressed that “The decisive element was the workers’ unity.
They paralyzed all the factories and every single truck. Also key was the
participation of the Sole Union of Carbonated Beverages and Related Industry
Workers (SUTIAGA), which meant no Coca-Cola products and no
Brahma or Isenbeck beers were distributed, in addition to the
whole range of Pepsi and Quilmes products.
This is a
historical event: the joint mobilization and solidarity of all the unions
involved -FATAGA, SUTIAGA, Truckers and Drivers-
stopped a transnational giant like AmBev from carrying out its
threatened plans to lay off workers. We achieved this with just one day of
strike. Because labor agreements are part of our national right to
self-determination and we’ve shown the other multinational corporations that
they can’t just come marching into Argentina and trample them,” he
concluded.
Lastly,
Hugo Moyano, general secretary of Argentina’s General Confederation
of Labor (CGT), member of the Truckers’ Union and father
of Pablo Moyano, expressed his satisfaction with the agreement
signed, and publicly thanked President Néstor Kirchner and the
Minister of Labor, Carlos Tomada, for their efforts.
Carlos Amorín and
Javier Amorín
© Rel-UITA
April 11,
2007
Photo: Javier Amorín
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