The strike decided by the interurban transport drivers union, Aoita, it was total this Friday. There was not a single unit in operation. The show of force did not generate any type of concrete progress even in the salary negotiations. But the Transportation Secretariat of the Province, led by Marcelo Rodio, called a meeting of the union and the business chambers at 9, to try to anticipate the assembly that the drivers have planned to set a date for the strike for an indefinite period.
The call arose this Friday afternoon, before there was verbal fencing between all parties.
“Clearly there is a desire not to agree. And yesterday listening to the director of transportation we realized that it seems that the Government has no intention of this being solved and they are trying to make this explode,” Claudio Luna, union secretary of Aoita, told Miter 810 in the morning.
The Secretary of Transportation, Cristian Sansalone, said that they requested the intervention of Labor. “We ask the secretary to intervene in labor matters, by issuing a mandatory conciliation that allows us to continue discussing between the parties,” he said. This measure did not bring any concrete consequences, because Aoita – who had already warned it – did not comply with it.
The union, in a statement published on Thursday night, announced that next Monday there will be a plenary session of delegates in which an indefinite strike will be decided with a start date to be defined.
The call for the meeting on Monday seeks to deactivate this measure of force and find a temporary agreement that gives predictability to the system for a few months. But if that is not achieved, at least, that this complete paralysis of the system is not defined immediately and opens an umbrella to try to narrow the gap that exists between what is requested and what is offered, at least from the majority of the system’s business community.
Just as I had anticipated The voice, the offer that came to the union was from one of the two chambers that represent companies. This is Asetac, while the majority, Fetap, did not change its offer that had already been rejected by Aoita.
Asetac offered $350,000 non-remunerative for April and May, taking them to the basic level in June. That’s what Aoita was willing to close.
But Fetap remained with the offer of 25% on the basic price, which, strictly speaking, out of pocket, represented less than the $250,000 non-remunerative that the drivers received in April, according to the union’s calculation.
Fetap brings together around 80% of the companies, and Asetac barely 20%, with companies such as Buses Lep, Carcor and Lumasa.
Sansalone assured that the Province will not subsidize companies per kilometer again, but will maintain the change in demand subsidy scheme, with the financing of social tickets, of which the Free Educational Ticket is the most far-reaching.
And in radio statements he pointed out that Fetap is pushing to obtain subsidies, which were withdrawn when the Nation decided to stop paying them for the interior of the country, with a tariff compensation that was close to a 300 percent increase.
Now, the negotiation alternatives involve a staggered increase in rates to reduce the losses that companies have in the operation of the service (3,500 million pesos in March, according to Fetap), a decrease in kilometers traveled through the coordination of services between different companies in areas served by several and the possibility of advancing payments for subsidized tickets.
This Friday’s strike affected some 200,000 users throughout the province.
Only those who managed to enter the special transportation vehicles that the Province provided for emergencies were able to travel. “They told us from the Terminal that there was a woman with her daughter stranded, in these special cases of people who have been left unable to return, we will be able to have a Transportation vehicle to be able to take her home, to her destination. We are coordinating with the director of the terminal to evaluate the cases. The director is going to take the data and update us to help as much as possible,” Sansalone said in interviews he offered this Friday morning.
