The supergas distributor Riogas decided to fire 26 bottling plant operators and Acodike took the same measure with 27 workers.
In an internal communication, Riogas indicated that for decades it has made every effort to preserve the employment it provides throughout the country. That includes almost 300 directly hired officials and 3,000 indirect jobs.
The company indicated that as of March 1 and “for reasons totally unrelated to Riogas, the contractual conditions and commercials that ruled for 15 years in the packaging of supergas”.
According to the statement, this situation implies that the company is facing new and “significant leasing and investment costs” at the bottling plant and financial costs for purchasing supergas on credit. That adds up to less packaging volume.
For this reason, she explained that “she was forced to dismiss 26 workers from the packaging plant.”
The change in the rules of the game to which the distributor refers is the new lease which he should have assumed since March 1 for one of the two supergas bottling plants that are owned by Ancap.
Until February 28, the plants were leased by Gasur (40% owned by Ancap, 30% by Acodike and 30% by Riogas).. Last year ancap He had informed that these contracts would not be renewed with the same conditions and for that reason he made a call for bids for the next rental contracts.
One of the plants was leased by Acodike and the other by Riogas.
In the case of Acodike, 27 workers were dismissed. The leader of the supergas union Andrés Guichón informed The Observer that the layoffs in the two companies were in the afternoon shift. For this reason, the union declared itself in conflict and, if the situation does not change, as of Monday they will stop packaging bottles.
The company issued a statement explaining the dismissal of 14 effective workers and the rest eventual. “Unfortunately, in this case reality has shown that, despite these efforts, certain roots of wanting to keep jobs that do not add value to the client, force structural changes to maintain the survival of the company in a responsible manner,” he said. acodike.
In turn, it affirms that this reduction guarantees “the source of employment for those people who occupy the necessary positions to cover the volume of current demand, that is, positions that add value in the productive chain of the sector.”
“In this context, for a month, the company has communicated to temporary personnel (outsourced personnel hired in the harvest) that, since there is no volume of work that requires the contracted staff, the request to work fewer hours. As a result As a result of this situation, part of the Acodike staff did not agree to continue working on exactly the same tasks that they had been doing up to that moment. That is, the company was paying the salary to part of the staff without these workers being working“, he explained.
“This situation is clearly unfeasible for any company that intends to be sustainable in the short and medium term and unfair to workers who do work according to their responsibilities. This rigidity on the part of this sector of workers ultimately causes the company has no other alternative than to reorganize the way of working of a part of the staff“, he avoided.
Ancap’s response to Riogas
Given the Riogas statement in which they explained that the layoffs were due to changes in contractual conditions with Ancap, the state entity expressed itself in the opposite direction: “The regulation related to the calculation of packaging and distribution margins is outside the orbit of ANCAP and there have been no changes regarding what was established about them in the contracts, which after 15 years of application, expired on February 28,” the company clarified.
Regarding leasing costs, Ancap clarified that the cost “arises from a competitive process in which each of the interested parties made offers without any value restriction, according to their own analysis of the future of the business” and that the investments They are those that each company deems convenient and there is no contractual obligation on the part of Ancap.
“From Ancap we hope that the parties involved can generate spaces for dialogue and that collective bargaining prevail to clarify aspects of work organization and thus avoid actions that affect the supply of supergas to the population, particularly the most vulnerable sectors,” the statement ends.
