29 November, 2010
ICEM Chilean oil worker affiliate Fenatrapech is protesting against attempts to cut 530 workers, an effort to weaken the trade union ahead of moves to privatise the state-owned ENAP (National Petroleum Company). Workers at the Bio Bio refinery in Central Chile held a 24-hour strike on 19 November to protest the management plan to cut its workforce by 15%, 530 of the total 3,380 employees. The Bio Bio refinery workers’ strike was followed by industrial action in the southern Magallanes region, where most of ENAP’s exploration and production activity is based. For workers in the Magallanes region, there are very few employment alternatives available.
The company is offering unacceptably low compensation packages to departing workers.
The national government of President Sebastian Piñera plans to privatise much of the country’s major industries, including the oil and gas producer ENAP. The latest job cuts are seen as a further step towards that privatisation. Earlier in the year, energy minister Ricardo Raineri said that ENAP could potentially follow the same model as Brazil's federal energy company Petrobras and sell a stake to private investors.
Fenatrapech President Jorge Matute
ENAP employees are represented by ICEM affiliate Fenatrapech, the national federation of oil workers, headed by President Jorge Matute. Matute has lead attempts to negotiate the redundancy issue with management, while ENAP have refused to come to the table, instead pressing ahead with job cuts. The first 300 cuts of the 530 total are due to take place before the end of 2010.
This is just an attempt to weaken the union at the company in order to advance with the privatization process in the short term," states Matute.
The union reports that workers in the industry are currently enduring very hard times, for those workers to be informed that they are losing their jobs is difficult to accept, especially as it falls in the same week as ENAP executives signed renewed and improved contracts for oil exploration and production exploiting two oil fields in Ecuador. ENAP employees took pride in the new contracts of the company, and see them as direct achievement of the staff.
The Bio Bio refinery processes 116,000 barrels of oil per day, while the Magdallanes around 10,000. ENAP was hard hit by an earthquake last February.
View the ICEM solidarity letter to Fenatrapech in Spanish here.