Simón Santana, a victim of unsafe
working conditions in Uruguay

The transnational corporation Bimbo faces court actions
over fatal work accident

Simón was only 25. He was told to clean a machine that was running. The company was not complying with mandatory safety standards. He was working unsupervised. The machine had no protective guards. His belt was caught in the moving gears. His mother Alicia Farías denounced that his death could have been prevented. The case has been brought before civil and criminal courts, as well as labor courts, where a hearing was held on Monday, December 8.

Simón Santana Farías was about to turn 26. That fatal day he had been working for three and a half hours, cleaning a cooling machine in the company Panificadora Bimbo del Uruguay S.A., located in the outskirts of Montevideo, where he had started working in early 2008.

There had been cutbacks in personnel and on that day Simón was alone and unsupervised when his belt was caught in the machine’s gears. A whole 15 minutes went by before anyone came to his aid, but nothing could be done to save him. Simón Santana’s death exposed the total disregard for safety in the workplace exhibited by transnational corporations in Uruguay, corporations that come to the region in search of cheap labor and refuse to implement proper safety measures. According to reports by the International Union of Food Workers (IUF) and Uruguay’s trade union federation, PIT-CNT the situation of workers in the transnational corporations that operate in Uruguay is characterized by low wages and a young, inexperienced workforce, with workers that are constantly rotated or replaced if they so much as attempt to form a trade union. Simón’s mother, 50-year-old Alicia Farías (who named her son after Simón Riquelo, one of the children disappeared by the Uruguayan police forces during the dictatorship), is demanding justice. But above all, she does not want her son’s death to have been in vain and is calling for occupational safety to be considered a human right. “We can’t allow multinational corporations to have no regard for human integrity, to treat it as if it were worthless. It’s not that we didn’t expect it, but we can’t allow them to come here and take advantage of us, paying meager wages and not guaranteeing even the most basic safety conditions,” she told LA REPUBLICA. The outcome of an investigation conducted by inspectors of the Ministry of Labor and Social Security (MTSS) confirmed that the company was operating in violation of several provisions of the Occupational Accident Prevention Act (Law No. 5032), its regulatory Decree No. 406/1988, and Decree No. 103/1996 which ratifies UNIT (the Uruguayan Technical Standards Institute) guidelines. The company was not complying with applicable regulations in force, and if the machine had had protection guards, the accident would have never occurred. The Simón Santana case is now being investigated in a civil court proceeding (where the conciliation hearing failed), in a criminal court proceeding (where Judge Graciela Eustachio is conducting an inquiry), and in a labor court proceeding, under which a hearing was held at MTSS headquarters in Montevideo on December 8.

The importance of the name Simón

“During the last years of the dictatorship and the democratic transition, we formed Mate Luna, a community of puppeteers, and we used to perform with other cultural groups like Girasol. We lived in a cooperative in the working-class neighborhood of Peñarol. We formed the puppeteer group and worked with the kids in Firulete, a children’s carnival outfit. In 1982, I got pregnant and we initially thought it was going to be a girl. That was when we first heard Sara Méndez’ story and how her infant son, Simón Riquelo, had been taken away from her. Then, on November 24 of that year, my son was born, and my husband, Ronald Santana, and I both immediately decided to name him Simón, after the missing baby,” Alicia Farías recalls. Alicia’s face lights up when she remembers those years, a time when she participated in numerous mobilizations, soup kitchens, cooperatives and social activities, taking her puppet show and her two kids, baby Simón and his older brother Facundo, across the country. The two boys were present, in their parents’ arms, at significant events in the early 1980s, like the historic May 1^st march -the first after so many years of dictatorship- and the huge rally for democracy at the Obelisco that came to be known as the “river of freedom,” where Mate Luna set up a giant puppet next to the tent of the human rights organization Serpaj. Simón and Facundo grew up behind the puppet stage. “Simón was a restless boy. He even got lost in the crowd at some of these activities. We would take our eyes off him for a second and he’d be gone, but then a little while later he’d be right next to the stage and the sound crew would be calling for his parents to come fetch him,” says Alicia, and laughs at the memory of her small son, and for a moment all the pain she’s been suffering these last three months evaporates. In the late 1990s, Alicia’s marriage breaks up and she emigrates to Brazil with her children. Simón was 15 when they moved and he had already completed a computer maintenance and assembly course. In Curitiba, Brazil, he continued with his technical training in computers. In late 2007, they came back to Uruguay. Simón could only find work in a cleaning company and it was that experience that helped him secure a position in the bread manufacturer Bimbo. “Simón was a good kid, he always followed the orders that his superiors gave him,” Alicia says.

“It’s an opportunity to grow...”

Simón was really excited when he was hired by Bimbo. “It’s a factory and a great opportunity to grow, you know? I won’t be washing windows forever,” he told his mother. He began working in January 2008 and quickly became an efficient worker of the Mexican-based transnational corporation. He was assigned to cleaning tasks in the Maintenance Department. But in May he suffered his first accident when he cut his hand on a heavy sheet of steel that slipped from his grip. “He almost cut a tendon,” Alicia explains. He was only given a couple of sick days covered by the State Insurance Bank, and then he had to go back to work. “I thought that that was the worst risk he would have to face. I was under the impression that he worked in a very large bakery or something, cleaning trays and that sort of thing. One day he told me about a special task he had to do every two weeks, which was cleaning that cooling machine. He didn’t want to do that. I even told him to ask if he could work in the plant and he told me that he was thinking of applying for a transfer, but to work in another plant in Paraguay, where he had more possibilities of being promoted. He had discussed this with the company’s counselor. But he wasn’t a very ambitious boy; he was different from his brother in that sense.” Meanwhile, Simón would not give up his passion for computers. He sold his cell phone, took out a loan, and started buying parts to build his own computer. He even assembled a computer for a coworker. "His brother, Facundo, told me that he was very good at it. It was what he really loved. He would come home from work and go straight to his computer things. He also loved the movies and music. He listened to bands like No Te Va Gustar, Bajofondo, Omar, and Bersuit. He was a wholesome boy, although he wasn’t very much into sports. He was very close to his family.” Shortly after being hired by Bimbo, Simón told his mother that there had been some labor problems there. The workers were not organized in a trade union, and the workforce was made up mostly of young people who were paid low wages and did not last long on the job. A classic example of how a transnational corporation operates. The cleaning crew consisted of five people, but four months ago the company fired two of them when it cut back on personnel. “I spoke to some of his coworkers after what happened, and I could tell that they were afraid,” Alicia says.

“Caught in the gears and pulled in”