Protests in oil union, for 17 thousand jobs at stake: workers

Jared Laureles and Eirinet Gomez

reporter and correspondent

Newspaper La Jornada
Wednesday, April 27, 2022, p. 13

The proliferation of protests against Petróleos Mexicanos (Pemex) led by its union is due, according to active employees and dissidents, to agreements that the same guild endorsed to reduce positions during the administration of former leader Carlos Romero Deschamps and that now they want to defend.

At the same time, the union leadership led by Ricardo Aldana who pressionsbecause they want the 17,000 jobs that President Andrés Manuel López Obrador offered to base temporary personnel, with the aim of “negotiating them, receiving nights and give them to their relatives,” said workers who requested anonymity for fear of reprisals.

Yesterday there were demonstrations again by members of the Petroleum Workers Union of the Mexican Republic (STPRM) in various work centers and Pemex plants for the alleged breach of the collective agreement by the company.

In Xalapa, they placed banners and tarps on the perimeter fence of the Pemex base in protest because, they said, they lack security equipment, housing loans, scholarships, loans, and medical supplies, and there are no contracts.

The spokesman for the Presidency, Jesús Ramírez Cuevas, stated in brief statements that the demonstrations in some sections of the oil union are organized by their leaders in reaction to the fact that Pemex implemented a new plan to achieve the regularization of workers who have temporary positions.

These are, he said, protests orchestrated by the leaders, because Now there will no longer be the sale of places or collection of quotas in exchange for temporary or permanent places, nor for temporary workers, and there will be a plan to regularize their situation. That is why there is disagreement, because the business is over.

The union administrative agreement 10717/2013 established in the collective bargaining agreement (CCT) 2013/2015, a copy of which this newspaper has, accounts for the downsizing of the workforce and it was signed by former secretary general Romero Deschamps and by Aldana, then president of the general surveillance council, in 2013, during the administration of Enrique Peña Nieto.

President López Obrador revealed in 2020 that oil leaders offered to increase the retirement age in exchange for maintaining their privileges in the CCT review with Pemex a year earlier.

Yesterday, most of the 36 sections of the STPRM held extraordinary assemblies to define actions.

The real reason for the protests is that they are ambitious the 17,000 places, because they want to preserve their economic interests and canonries and charge fees for transfers to the refineries from Deer Park, in the United States, and from Dos Bocas, Tabasco, assured María de Lourdes Díaz Lula, from the National Oil Transformation Movement.