A new hearing convened by the Córdoba Secretariat of Labor ended without progress between Pauny and the UOM over the wages owed in Las Varillas. Workers remain in control of the plant and the conflict has spread to La Banda, where 50 employees are occupying the facility.
Pauny's crisis added a new chapter of tension in Las Varillas this Thursday. A hearing convened by the Córdoba Secretariat of Labor ended without concrete progress and with increasingly clashing positions between the board of the tractor factory and the workers, who have been inside the facilities since Tuesday to demand payment of the wages owed and guarantees on the continuity of their jobs.
The meeting had raised expectations of finding some kind of answer after weeks of mounting conflict. However, as the Unión Obrera Metalúrgica (UOM) charged, the company again showed up without a concrete plan to settle the wage debts or any details on how it intends to sustain industrial activity. The consequence was the ratification of the work stoppage and of the workers' continued presence inside the plant.
The new failure of the negotiations was preceded by a statement from Pauny's board, released just minutes before the hearing. In it, the company acknowledged that it is going through a situation of "extreme financial difficulty", while defending the steps it says it has taken over the past months to try to sustain activity and preserve jobs.
According to the board, over the past two years the farm machinery industry went through a crisis that seriously affected both production and sales. The company said it was not immune to that scenario and that it made "enormous efforts" together with workers, suppliers and managers to try to stay afloat. "Throughout all this time, the company sought to preserve every source of work, even at the cost of major financial sacrifices, trusting in a market recovery that unfortunately did not materialize," it stated.
The most controversial point of the document was its claim that the previous Monday it had submitted a concrete proposal to partially ease the workers' situation. According to the company itself, those funds would come from the sale of products still awaiting completion: two tractors that are ready for delivery.
The union's response was blunt. For the UOM, the company's document does not match what happened in previous meetings and does not amount to a payment proposal either. "At no point did the company state concretely how it would pay the wages owed (which keep growing)," the union said in a statement issued after the meeting.
The general secretary of the UOM in San Francisco, Lucas Sarmiento, flatly rejected that interpretation. He explained that neither in Monday's hearing nor in the one held this Thursday was there a concrete offer that would make it possible to establish how the owed wages would be settled. "We came out again with no proposal of any kind, just a statement that, frankly, we find deeply offensive," the metalworkers' leader said during the press conference after the meeting.
"The company said the same thing again, nothing at all; it has no proposal whatsoever on the wage debt it has with the workers, it simply limited itself to words. We told the company that we want money for the workers urgently. And afterwards, from there, we can start talking about getting the company running again," he stated.
That is why the union demanded full payment of the wages owed and called on the board to present an action plan detailing how it intends to tackle the crisis, guarantee the continuity of operations and keep every job. Another dispute was added to the wage fight: during the hearing, the union demanded the reinstatement of three dismissed workers, whom it considers victims of retaliation for their union activity and their participation in the demands made during the previous hearing. "We are demanding the immediate reinstatement of three of our colleagues who were fired without any kind of cause, because the situation has nothing to do with the dismissals," Sarmiento stated.
One of the aspects that worries workers most is the lack of concrete signs of an eventual restart of production. Although Pauny maintains that it needs to resume activity and that every tractor finished and sold represents an opportunity to generate revenue, the UOM warns that the material conditions to return to normal work are currently not in place. "The guys are willing to work, but inside the company there is nothing, there is no material, no inputs, there is absolutely nothing," he described.
"The workers want to get back to work, but with a more real, more concrete situation about how we are going to move forward," Sarmiento said in an interview with Bichos de Campo.
The conflict has its Santiago del Estero chapter. In La Banda, the plant Pauny owns was taken over by its 50 workers the previous day. In this case, as journalist Melina Pivetta reported, the provincial police raised the tension and demanded that the takeover be lifted, which the employees rejected. However, they were forced to take down the sign reading "Plant occupied".
Speaking with Bichos de Campo, Sarmiento described the workers' state of mind and their decision not to leave the facilities until a solution is reached. "A very distressing situation, a situation bordering on desperation. But well, here we are with our colleagues, we are still inside the factory," he explained. And he was even more emphatic about keeping the measure in place: "We are not going to leave until we have concrete answers on how they are going to move forward. And our colleagues are inside protecting their jobs. They will have to carry us out feet first."
The severity of the conflict is also explained by the impact Pauny has on Las Varillas. The company is not just a metalworking industry that employs hundreds of people: its activity has a knock-on effect on an extensive network of suppliers, shops and services that depend directly or indirectly on the economic activity generated by the factory. Sarmiento placed special emphasis on that aspect and spoke of more than a thousand people affected when workers and their families are considered as a whole. "There are families here, there are more than a thousand souls behind this, because it is not only the direct workers but the entire productive fabric of Las Varillas," he explained.
The union leader's description of the social consequences of the crisis was particularly harsh. "There are colleagues who have been evicted, colleagues whose door the debt collectors knock on every day, while we have colleagues who are drowning at the banks, because throughout this period they kept taking on more and more debt, and now it has been more than two months since they had a single peso in their pocket," he recounted.
The workers' presence inside the factory began at the start of this week, after the conflict over unpaid wages deepened. Since then, the possibility that the measure could lead to the plant being run by the workers themselves, as happened during the 2001 crisis, began to hover over the discussions. Sarmiento acknowledged that the possibility had been analyzed, although he made clear that the decision to stay in the facilities responds, for now, to the need to protect jobs and demand an answer from those in charge of the company.
"We and the workers are going to stay inside the company for as long as necessary. We do not take this issue, this action, as an act of irresponsibility, or of haste, or anything of the sort. We had been working on this for a long time, we knew that at some point it was going to come. The moment has come and here we are," he explained.
The Córdoba Secretariat of Labor set a new hearing for Thursday, November 12 at 10, with the aim of getting Pauny to comply with the summonses issued by the union. Until then, the workers will remain inside the factory. "I brought my bag from San Francisco; I am going to leave with the workers or feet first," Sarmiento said during the press conference.
