The situation of the 72 employees of the Perla del Este fishery continues to be completely uncertain. Tomorrow the Province will deposit $75,000, which is what they should receive every fortnight. But they will not collect their bonuses and they do not know what will happen to what they should receive for the last installment of the month.
Meanwhile The owners of the company, which has been closed for two months, have still not sent them the dismissal telegrams. And they claim that only They have the means to cover a percentage of the compensation, which would amount, according to what they estimated, to a total of $250,000,000.
Today, at 2:00 p.m., there will be a new meeting in Viedma’s work portfolio. There will be the provincial officials, the Union of Food Industry Workers (STIA) and the two managers of the firm. to the latter they will be asked to define what they intend to do with the plant. From the Stía they will insist that they take away their fishing permits.
“The offer to indemnify 50% is based on what we can absorb, which is close to $120,000,000. We do not want to harm anyone, and obviously we know that Justice contemplates something else and it is something that would have to be agreed, but it is our reality ” assured Carlos Matas, one of the people in charge of the plant, in dialogue with Río Negro.
“In fishing you can bet on production or speculation. We are committed to growing. We went from 32 to 72 employees and we took out loans because we were going to take our product (hake and shrimp) frozen and packaged in Ziploc type bags to supermarkets within the domestic market, initially marketing throughout the southern area. Then everything changed. He increasingly reduced the hake in the Gulf (San Matías) and in the summer no shrimp were caught. This caused us a significant financial imbalance, and with the previous two years of the pandemic we could not resist, ”explained Matas.
“Today we would have to pay $250,000,000 in compensation and we cannot cover them. We have been operating in the Port of San Antonio Este for 9 years. But, when we started, we were forced to ‘inherit’ almost half of our staff from the former firm Pesca Austral. That is why we have employees with a seniority of 20 to 25 years. And that greatly increases our costs when indemnifying” expanded man.
“The situation anguishes me, but this led to the lack of fishing resources. Today we have only 6 people who we decided to keep working for us. They are two night watchmen and maintenance and administrative personnel, because we do not want the plant to deteriorate. But it’s stopped. And we have closed particular agreements with 23 of the 72 employees, who agreed to receive lesser compensation,” said the businessman.
“There is no speculation to start working with a cooperative or anything like that. It is the crisis that led us to this” he concluded.
In this context, the Province promised to cover the salaries of the people. But now he has changed his position, stating that he cannot sustain this delivery of funds.
in the meeting of Today they will try to clarify the situation currently inactive staff are going through.
The situation of the former workers is also extreme, because although they were told that they there would be two firms interested in reactivating the plant (one that operates in Chubut and the other in Bahía Blanca) so far there are no concrete news.