Dairy farmers warned Mieres that they will not expose their cows and there will be spillage of milk

Leandro Galarraga, president of the National Association of Milk Producers (ANPL), explained that on other occasions, when there were union measures and the tanker arrived a few hours late to collect the milk from the cold tanks, what the dairy farmer did was delay the next milking of the cows for a few hours, in order to carry out this task once it had storage capacity.

That is not appropriate, he stressed, since It is demanded of the animal, putting its health at risk, especially the quality of the udders and compromising the good subsequent productive conditions, giving rise to costly adversities to overcome, such as mastitis..

“If union measures arrive that affect the collection of milk from the dairy this time we are not going to expose the cows, we are not going to use our cattle as a milk tank, when it is time to milk it will be milked and if the capacity of the tanks is exceeded there will be a spill of milkWe are sorry,” he stressed.

The producer added: “It is undoubtedly a loss for the dairy farmer, but we are going to prioritize taking care of the health of the cows even if the milk spills.”

Producers will not require cows to retain more milk than usual.

Galarraga said to The Observer that the concern based on the extension of the conflict, which began more than two months ago, increased and that this motivated the union to request various meetings, with the participation of representatives of other unions of producers in the sector.

“We requested audiences with the Minister of Labor, the PIT-CNT and the Livestock Commissions of Deputies and Senators and the first response came from the ministry,” he reported.

At the meeting, the dairy farmers presented their views on the conflict. They said that has been extended too much, something that is not understood when a proposal for an economic agreement is on the table that contemplates the aspirations of the parties (workers and company), “both the salary recovery due to inflation due to the loss that occurred during the pandemic and the new corrective for inflation for the future.”

Requirement: peace clause

“What we ask is that there be certainties about a necessary trade union peace from the time there is an agreement onwards and for the period of that agreement that is signed, moreover, we emphatically told the industry not to sign the agreement if there are no guarantees, if that peace clause is not establishedwe cannot sign an agreement with a peace clause as it was signed in 2018 in something that the union has continuously failed to comply with in recent times by carrying out periodic strikes,” he explained.

Mieres will summon the parties

Galarraga said that the minister informed them that in the next few days he will reconvene the parties -the Uruguayan Chamber of the Dairy Industry (CILU) and the Federation of Dairy Industry Workers (FTIL)-, which are working on this clause. of peace; “On this we insist that this peace clause must be effective, not like the previous ones,” he added.

On the position of the workers, he said: “We are very sorry for the actions that the union is carrying out and the threats that are in their communications, we are outraged by the lack of sanity and empathyit seems that there was a lack of knowledge of the dairy industry to which they also belong”, basically alluding to the distortion that union measures generate in industrial operations with damage to companies and dairy farmers and especially to the threats about interrupting the export flow , which would be added to the problems already noted in the supply of some products in the domestic market.

This Friday the workers express themselves again with mobilizations in front of Conaprole’s Montevideo Industrial Complex (CIM), located on the accesses to Montevideo.

EO