Tubacex Maintenance Workers Report Management Using Punishment Threats to Precarize Their Situation
- The maintenance workers of the plant that Tubacex has in Llodio have published a text explaining that their working conditions are becoming increasingly precarious. On the one hand, management uses threats of punishment and, on the other, they are becoming less and less and their resources are diminishing.
The workers in the maintenance department of the company TTI, of the Tubacex group, have come together to make a public statement. The workers at the Llodio plant have denounced that the management has begun to perform 'contact minutes' systematically against the workers of this section. They have made it clear that, in principle, these minutes can be used as aggravating events in the event of a fault.
Workers consider that there is a serious communication problem between maintenance officers and workers and that every time an accident occurs, officers issue their records instead of talking to the workers themselves.
The maintenance group emphasizes that its members are professionals: “We’re not going to let anyone doubt it. We are a group and we respond as a group, unlike our leaders.”
In particular, the people who work in this section criticize that the management has closed the doors to internal promotion and that it has hired external staff to assume official responsibilities. “Managers don’t know the machines or the workers,” they added.
By the way, the sanctions are not unknown in this section, as in 2020 the company sanctioned a maintenance worker, leaving him without pay for 60 days.
Accidents and productivity
Workers believe that the aim of threats of punishment is to increase production, to the detriment of workers. In this sense, they have pointed out that their section is the one that suffers the most accidents at work and that it cannot be forgotten that in 2019 a 25-year-old worker died when working in the ITT infrastructure in maintenance work.
Standardisation and time handling
The maintenance group has pointed out that one of the objectives of the company is to standardize the time of the work, and although they do not oppose it, they highlight that they perform very different repairs and that it is difficult to establish it. In addition, they have accused the authorities in the section of changing reports when they don’t like the times officials have received.
To all this, the workers have added the old complaint about the obsolescence of the machinery and the shortage of spare parts and tools for repairs. This influences intervention times and the risk of accidents.
Maintenance restrictions
Finally, the workers consider that the current situation is the result of a process that has been started a long time ago: there are fewer staff and, unlike other sections, they do not have a coordinator. In addition, external subcontracting has become normal to cover leave or vacation, which in their view is “illegal”.
For all these reasons, the maintenance team has requested the Staff Board to propose an extraordinary meeting to the management to address their situation.
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