The Automotive Tram Union (UTA) lifted the bus strike for 24 hours scheduled for this Thursday, February 8. The measure that short and medium distance bus drivers were going to carry out It was going to affect the interior of the country. Finally, the union will abide by the mandatory conciliation decreed by the National Government.
“In response to the dictate of the Mandatory Conciliation by the Secretary of Labor of the Nation, Ministry of Human Capital, the union entity informs that it will comply with it, leaving without effect the action measures that had been resolved for the 8th of February of this year,” the UTA noted in a statement signed by the National Board of Directors and the Sectional Executive Boards of the union.
In any case, the union clarified: “We also inform that we will not take a step back until we obtain the increase for workers in the automotive passenger transport of the Interior of the Country.”
Finally, the UTA stated that they will attend the hearing on February 14 and added: “We will hope that all those responsible for Interior Transportation will provide the solutions that the workers demand.”
The measure had been announced hours after salary negotiations between union leaders and Argentine Federation of Passenger Motor Carriers (FATAP) They will not come to fruition.
This last meeting, which took place on Tuesday, It was the fifth unsuccessful attempt to reach an agreement for increases.
During the meeting, the union requested an increase equivalent to that recently granted to drivers in the Buenos Aires Metropolitan Areawhose basic salaries reached $575 thousand for January and $737 thousand for February, numbers to which is added an extraordinary fixed sum of $390,000, which will be paid in two installments.
After failing to reach a common point, The Automotive Tram Union (UTA) issued a statement announcing the force measure under the motto “Equal pay for equal work”, relating this to the disparate situation between Greater Buenos Aires and the rest of Argentina. However, hours later the national government issued mandatory conciliation and deactivated the strike.
For public transport employers, “the direction of gradual reduction of subsidies must be ratified”
The 24-hour bus strike is lifted throughout the interior of the country
“We inform workers, national, provincial, municipal authorities, users and public opinion in general, that we have witnessed a new failure of the fifth round of joint negotiations for the represented personnel of the Interior of the country, held before the Ministry of Labor of the Nation,” the leaders expressed in the document.
In turn, they criticized the business chamber of the sector, which, they stated, “no salary offer has been madestating that the National State has suppressed all contributions to inland transportation“.
Based on this context, they determined “the implementation of union action measures, initially a 24-hour strike throughout the interior of the country, for Thursday”.
“The measure of strength is pushed by those in charge of the responsibility and obligation to solve the Federal Transportation Structural Crisisand they intend to condemn the workers of the interior to the loss of purchasing power of their salaries, forcing us to fight and harming more than 9 million passengers that we transport daily,” the UTA concluded in its letter.
It should be noted that, in recent weeks, the mayors of the cities of Córdoba, Rio Cuarto, Rosario, Santa Fe, Paraná, Neuquén and Formosa, together with the communal chief of the Buenos Aires party of General Pueyrredón, jointly declared the “economic emergency” of urban transportation as consequence of the asymmetry of subsidies with the AMBA.
The last distribution of Nation subsidies through the Compensation Fund for Public Automotive Transport of the Interior was that corresponding to the September-December period, which involved four monthly and consecutive payments of $9,000 million for the provinceswhich was reinforced with another $6 billion in mid-November, the agency reported Telam.