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   Argentina

Quilmes-AmBev

Brewery giant takes a step back

 

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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