The government of Luis Lacalle Pou suspects that the Montecon port company has allied itself with the union to reach a “maximum confrontation,” according to the newspaper El País, citing ministerial sources.
The company and the union, one of the sources would have said, are not in agreement with the conflict that affects the entry and exit of containers in the port. This Wednesday the sectorized strike that began last Monday in protest at the dismissal of 150 employees that had been announced by the company days ago is still in force.
In negotiations with the union and the government, it was later decided that 125 will be sent to unemployment insurance.
Positions and arguments
Montecon has its arguments for reducing the workforce: last April, the manager of the company, Martín González, told the same newspaper that decree 115 gave priority to the Cuencas del Plata terminal, owned by the Belgian company Katoen Natie. This means that Montecon lost the transit of the shipping services Mediterranean Shipping Company (MSC) and GSG (owned by Hapag Lloyd) that moved some 180,000 containers per year.
Also in April, the company Neltume Ports SA, with Chilean capital, and the Canadian ATCO Ltd., shareholders of Montecon, activated the dispute resolution mechanism with international arbitration because they understood that they were affected by the agreement between the government of Luis Lacalle Pou and Katoen Natie to give priority to the latter.
Since then, the workers had manifested themselves in alert and had warned that they were “at the gates of a conflict” that finished crystallizing this week.
