The Council of the Official Financial Sector concluded a round of conversations with the directors of the state banks. In all these interviews, a delegation from the Association of Bank Employees of Uruguay (AEBU) presented the need to fill vacancies, and the specific points of each of the banks contained in the union’s platform. Given this, members of the Board of Directors of the different state banks, recognized the lack of employees to serve various sectors, some qualified as “critical”.
According to Marcelo Ronchi, president of the council of the official sector, to a greater or lesser extent, “bank boards share the need to fill vacancies, given the difficulties they encounter in maintaining services”. Ronchi commented to the AEBU Portal that the leaders explained to the representatives of the Association that “they are negotiating with the Planning and Budget Office (OPP), to incorporate new officials, fundamentally for areas classified as “critical”.
In this regard, they mentioned that a consultant hired by the Insurance Bank (BSE) found that the staffing of that institution is adequate, so that the replacement of its vacancies is justified. He also said that the directors of the official banks have promised not to close branches and to try to improve competitiveness, Ronchi said. Precisely, within the negotiation of particular conditions of the collective agreement with the Insurance Bank, Ronchi said that his board of directors expressed its willingness to form a commission to study the format of breaks, as well as the item for user service in the hospital. In this bank, the scope of negotiation of the teleworking regulation was also launched.
In turn, the BROU board informed AEBU that this year 150 workers joined the existing priority list, another 200 will join in June and other vacancies will be filled during the rest of the year. The board of directors of this bank was also reconsidered the situation of the fellow armored car drivers and the zonal compensation, which had been agreed with the administration and was rejected at the time by the OPP.
Ronchi added that, after the round of interviews with the banks, now the objective is to achieve the installation of a negotiation area with the Office of Planning and Budget (OPP) as soon as possible, in order to capture the progress made in talks with the boards and renew the collective agreement without salary loss.
On this point in particular, the leader said that “What we have by collective agreement is an adjustment formula that considers the inflation that the Government projected, and adds a corrective at the end of the period. If inflation was 10% and they had given us 5%, it should be adjusted. The Government changed the adjustment criteria and that change meant a loss of 2.96% corresponding to the previous year. The discussion with the Executive Branch is about what the loss is and how it is measured. We are not demanding a salary increase, just maintaining our purchasing power. And, precisely, AEBU demands the installation of a negotiation scope with the OPP to, among other points, measure this loss according to the Consumer Price Index (CPI), which was the valid reference of the official banking agreement”.
