Chile’s Postal Workers Start Their Third Week of Strike

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After fifteen days of mobilization, the postal workers are still in discussion with the company “Correos de Chile”.
SANTIAGO — “There is no motivation to earn 220,000 pesos after 15 years of work, it’s absurd. What we are demanding is the following: a salary increase of 50 thousand pesos per worker, a validity period of the collective contract that amounts to 24 months and a conflict-term bond for 1,500,000 pesos, this is not madness ,” insisted Guillermo Flores, president of the National Federation of Correos de Chile Workers, on his three major demands.

Pablo Montané, the company’s CEO, disagrees. From his point of view, the employee’s demands march upon a locura, since, according to Montané, the company made lots of efforts putting its profits available to employees: ”We made a historic offer to increase wages and benefits of workers,” affirmed the CEO on CNN Chile.

The strike is going on since the August 7 and although several meetings between the two parties have taken place, no solution could be reached.

While the strikers are fighting for decent salaries and complaining about the gap between the manager’s and the worker’s wages, the directors of Correos de Chile are trying to limit the damage on the company’s image by affirming that the strikers are falsifying the data through referring only to the lowest salaries and further accuse the strikers of putting the company in danger by demanding so much.

The national vice president of the Union of Workers of Correos de Chile, Fernando Olivares, is offended by these accusations:

“The CEO’s words are malicious, as he tries to say that we are endangering the company, but our answer is that the directors of the company are those, who put it at risk, after 20 managers were reimbursed $13 billion, in addition to the general manager, that got his salary readjusted, from $ 11 million to $ 17 million. “

This week the strike was pushed to an other level, since several postal workers around the country started a hunger strike. “This hunger strike is nationwide. Up to this day they were not taking the mobilization seriously and made fun of the workers, this is why this determination was made,” explained José Luis Tamayo, one of the hunger strikers.

For four days, the postal workers have been camping on the bank of the Mapocho river, waiting for the company to give a satisfactory answer. In this place they started with 20 people and today they are about 70 post workers settled on the Mapocho.

The follow on from the strike for Chilean population is the suspension of all parcel and mail services until further notice.