If there is truly hard work, it is that which is done in a slaughterhouse. Especially because, in intense physical and mental conditions, very precarious working conditions abounded for many years, in which fraud and exploitation abounded, and now the epidemic of African Swine Fever (APP) that appeared on the hill of Collserola (Barcelona) begins to appear with an ERTE of 458 workers in four slaughterhouses in the Osona region. In the slaughterhouses, the cutting rooms and the processing of meat products – especially at the beginning, where the vast majority of workers are immigrants with pressing economic needs and often little or not unionized, without mastery of the language or knowledge of their rights – the large companies in the sector throughout Spain used the figures of the false cooperative and the false autonomous, until the prison of the unions and the fines of the Labor Inspectorate forced us to dismantle the fraud, even before the pandemic. Since then, the sector, the unions explain, has changed a lot and companies generally respect legality. But precariousness remains high and questionable practices persist.
“These are very hard manual jobs, which can do a lot of things,” explains Alícia Buil, secretariat of the agri-food sector of UGT-Fica in Catalonia. The profile of slaughterhouse workers is that of people of migrant origin, with many economic needs to send money home and with fewer outflows than that. Buil considers it “painful” for society that second generations of migrants continue to work in these sectors. “All the work is worth it, but it’s very hard, and what’s more, the slaughterhouses don’t make the necessary investments to prevent the work from becoming too heavy,” he explains. Josep Rueda, Secretary General of Industry of CC OO in Catalonia, affirms that the precariousness of the sector can be explained by the fact that working conditions have been precarious for a long time: “Companies took advantage of a precarious situation in the square when there were false cooperatives. went to the hospital, they said they wanted four points and continued to work, because they needed them,” says Rueda.
In this environment without knowledge of labor rights, with language barriers and many economic needs, union organizing was very complicated, but the model of false cooperatives ended up being sanctioned and judicialized — in 2017, it was estimated that 10% of the 115,000 workers in the sector belonged to false cooperatives, which led to fines and sanctions. The Labor Inspectorate and convictions like that of the National Hearing against Servicarne—, and have been regularized for thousands of workers. Unions complained that workers began to be part of companies’ fixed installations, and this was generally achieved, but now the swine fever crisis has brought to light practices that unions have demanded to be investigated.
El jueves, the Government gives the green light to the first and only temporary employment regulation measure (ERTE) linked to swine fever. ERTE contacted CGTPlus, a temporary employment company (ETT) for 458 of its employees. They are assigned as temporary employees in four slaughterhouses in Santa Eugènia de Berga, in the Barcelona region of Osona, four companies that belong to the Aragonese meat company Grupo Jorge.
The outbreak of ASF, a very deadly virus in wild boars and wild boars, was detected in Collserola and remains contained a few weeks after its start in an outbreak of six kilometers in which 16 dead wild boars affected by ASF were found. Although it is highly targeted and although the virus is not contagious to other non-human species, the outbreak has had a very significant impact on pig meat markets, as its spread to meat farms could be catastrophic for the sector. The epidemic caused the automatic closure of export markets, even if they were in the process of reopening (for example, China or South Korea, which continues to buy pork products from Spain, except those coming from the affected area), and also caused a greater drop in prices.
Faced with the threat of the growth spreading, the Jorge Group slaughterhouses in Osona, an area relatively close to Barcelona, decided to temporarily paralyze their activity and therefore do without ETT employees. This, in turn, asked ERTE, for reasons of greater force, to temporarily suspend the contracts of its workers. But this is the only thing requested, while the rest of the companies in the sector have continued to work.
Rueda explains that the Government has asked the Ministry of Labor to activate the RED mechanism for the approved ERTE for reasons of greater force. In this way, all workers who are part of the ERTE will be entitled to a benefit. Until the mechanism is activated, it will be enough to help workers who have spent more than a year in the company. In a sector as precarious as this, turnover is very high, so it is not clear how many workers affected will meet the conditions required to achieve performance.
Regarding ERTE, Rueda explains that this episode requires increased attention to the use of ETT in the sector. “The labor reform says that when a company needs a lot of work for its operation, this task must be fixed. It is clear that in the meat sector there are production peaks that are necessary temporarily, but we must verify if these 458 workers were really temporary or if they worked stably,” he says. Buil recalls that Grupo Jorge “has always lacked legality” and asks the Labor Inspectorate to investigate the time it took these workers to take up their positions. “We are in favor of ERTE, but we want it to explore the subject further,” he explains.
Regardless, the unions are pleased that there is only one request from ERTE and that the impact on work of swine fever is currently limited. “Management has been rapid by the administration since the detection of the germ,” underlines Buil.
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