The union conflict that has been taking place since the beginning of May generated various adverse impacts on Conaproledenounced this Tuesday Gabriel Fernández, president of the cooperative: the company lost the sale of 1.5 million liters of long-life milk in three weeks, will default on export business and even must pay at least one fine to a customer in the Chinese market.
Fernández, accompanied by the rest of the members of the company’s board of directors, affirmed that the conflict is “inexplicable” and requested the Association of Workers and Employees of Conaprole (AOEC) to annul measures that generate significant distortion in the activity and business of the company, with damages throughout the dairy agro-industrial chain.
“No company can work in peace under these conditions”he said, after which he pointed out that the amount of milk in stock in the silos is 5.5 million liters when the daily industrial capacity is 4 million liters.
Will the silos hold?
If the union measures persist, they may even worsen this Wednesday at the AOEC board meeting, it is feared that the silos will not be able to store all the raw material from the dairy farms and milk will have to be spilled, which has already happened.
“We are not producing long-life milk and the market is seeing it,” he added on the issue of shortages, which can also be accentuated and spread to other products.
After pointing out that the producers are coming from a difficult situation due to the drought, he admitted that During the past week, milk had to be spilled in a dairy since the raw material was not collected in a timely manner, “4,000 or 5,000 liters have been thrown away”.
Regarding the situation of the dairy farmers, he said: “I understand the discomfort, I am a producer, we have come from very difficult months, now the city is seeing it with the lack of water,” and recalled that The National Milk Institute (Inale) evaluated the losses due to the drought in the dairy sector at more than US$ 100 million.
bring
Truck queues to unload raw material.
The reason for the conflict
The reason for the conflict is the number of people linked to the management of a packaging machine that was imported from Sweden for US$ 4.5 million at the end of 2022 and it has been operational since January at the Rodríguez (San José) plant, after the use of two machines over 30 years old had been discontinued, “which work with old containers” and were “very inefficient”.
The union wants 32 people to remain in this management when the company proposes that only 22 or 23 are necessaryand the rest are relocated to other tasks that they have already carried out when the UHT sector was stopped (for example, due to the existence of a high stock of those ultra-pasteurized milks).
There are no effects such as layoffs or salary reductionshe pointed out: “The machine remains in the same plant, the salary and hourly conditions and the rest of the benefits are maintained in all terms, even those who are not operating the machine at the moment go to other sectors of the plant, which has already happened,” he explained.
“It is a new technology that what it does is ensure the future of work,” said the president of Conaprole.
Fernández asked that the cessation of union measures (work by regulation and stoppages in shifts) be immediate, in order to avoid further damage, because Conaprole is working in an extreme situation, which generates cost overruns and labor relations “are to work in peace, we cannot live in a permanent conflict”.
Finally, Fernández explained that due to the conflict Conaprole is not being able to adequately fulfill its missionwhich is to industrialize the milk of the country’s dairy farmers through healthy, environmentally sustainable and quality products to supply the domestic market and the world, therefore he requested apologies to consumers.
Mieres: “slow down with the measures to be able to move forward”
Pablo Mieres, Minister of Labor and Social Security, this Tuesday alluded to the conflict in Conaprole. He said that there is a search for instances of dialogue, with nothing agreed, although he awaits news on that. “We are very concerned,” he said when he alluded to the union measures, given that, he said, they affect not only production, but also citizens and dairy farmers, measures that he pointed out “are not proportionally related to the problem that gave rise to this matter”. He added that “initiating a dialogue process necessarily implies stopping with the measures in order to move forward.”
In some dairy farms milk had to be spilled.
