Bilbao (EFE)
Shortly before starting a demonstration in the center of Bilbao, ELA spokespersons, Ander Akarregi and Ainoha Tirapu, have criticized these minimal services that “make invisible and prevent the strike.”
The sector, which groups 5,000 people, mostly women, demands salary equality with IFAS personnel.
60% of user spaces are private and arranged with the Provincial Council.
“If the money leaves the same place in both cases, the working conditions must also be the same,” they have stressed.
They demand indefinite contracts
Other demands are the hiring of 100% of the day and 95% of workers, “at least”, with indefinite contracts.
They also ask for substitutions from the first day of sick leave, because this situation “directly affects the quality of the service.”
Demonstration in Bilbao of workers from the residences of Bizkaia. EFE/Miguel Toña.
They have also announced that if the employers maintain “their lack of will to negotiate” until May 3, the date the strike ends, they will continue with the strikes.
They want the Provincial Council to “force or require the employers to resolve this conflict.”
They have stressed that they have maintained their demands for a year and a half.
The wages of the workers are frozen while “user fees have been updated, above the CPI, on the grounds that it would improve wage conditions.”
39 days of strikes
Tirapu recalled that the previous strike ended last March and that the sector has a total of 39 days of strikes.
He has also criticized the “hypocrisy” of the Basque Government for talking about turning March 8, Working Women’s Day, into a holiday, “when it allows a conflict in a highly feminized sector to drag on.”
The LAB union has held assemblies and mobilizations in the care sector throughout the Basque Country with the aim of having these workers recognized as public employees and to express their rejection of the privatization of these services.
According to this center, the fact that the institutions delegate the management of this care to private companies entails a “harm” in the conditions of the workers as well as “the degradation and worsening” of the service.
EFE