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Numerous trade
unions from the meatpacking sector gathered in São Paulo on Sept. 23-24 at a
massively attended meeting. The
event was hosted by the Federation of Food Industry Workers of São Paulo (FETIASP)
and its president, Melquíades de Araújo. SIREL spoke with Artur Bueno de Camargo,
president of the National Confederation of Food and Related Industry Workers (CNTA)
and member of the IUF’s Latin America Committee, to learn about the meeting’s
results.
-What was the
purpose of this meeting?
-We gathered
for the National Meeting of the Meatpacking Sector, with the participation of
our CNTA and the IUF. Eight statewide federations and 22 trade
unions from across the country took part in the meeting.
The meeting’s
discussions revealed that our sector’s workers face the same exact problems in
every state. We focused on the unhealthy and humiliating conditions we work in,
on the enormous number of workers affected by RSIs and WMSDs
(repetitive stress injuries and work-related musculoskeletal disorders)
caused by the frantic work pace, and we examined other issues, such as the low
wages paid and the excessively high worker turnover, which is used as a
mechanism to push wages down.
-What decisions
were made?
-The main
decision, I think, is that we agreed on the need to launch an action plan, which
begins with the adoption of the Sao Paulo Declaration, signed
by all the organizations that participated in the meeting, describing the
situation of the workers of the meatpacking and poultry sector. This Declaration
will give all unions clear guidelines for action.
We also decided
to form a Committee with two union representatives from each state, which will
be in charge of coordinating actions along with CNTA and the IUF.
On Oct. 7, this
new body will have its first meeting, where it will organize the actions
planned. These will begin on Oct. 16 with a huge nation-wide mobilization of the
sector’s workers, that will include staging two-hour work stoppages and handing
out flyers to inform workers and society in general about the great obstacles we
face in improving wage and working conditions in our sector.
-The meeting
also decided to carry out an international campaign on these issues…
-That’s one of
the decisions included in the São Paulo Declaration. The idea is to
coordinate this campaign with labor organizations in other countries, to match
the strategy of large corporations, which are increasingly merging, with the
negative consequences that such strategy has for workers, because these mergers
inevitably come with cost reductions that entail wage cuts.
-Several of the
leading companies in the sector are in fact Brazilian-based transnational
corporations.
-This sector is
undergoing the same process that we saw in the brewery industry, with the
emergence of AmBev and then InBev. Which is why we need to begin
globalizing our labor struggles. As I said at the meeting, the economy is
globalized, and so is trade and communications, but labor is still lagging
behind. So we understand that the IUF’s current efforts towards
international integration and information dissemination are critical for
organized workers from different countries to achieve a unified struggle.
-What prospects
are there in this context?
-We hope that,
in the framework of the action plan mapped out at the meeting, by year’s end
we’ll have our trade unions and organizations fully mobilized nationwide, so
that next year we can begin to step up our struggle.
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