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“If the deal is not approved, TAP must be closed.” For André Teives, president of the Union of Handling Technicians and representative of the ground personnel unions platform, the conclusion is simple, given what he considers to be “the world turned upside down”: the Government has not discussed the matter with the unions and will do it Present TAP’s restructuring plan to Brussels before approving it in Portugal. Last night, in the program “Tudo é Economia”, hosted by Rui Alves Veloso in RTP 1, the union leader criticized the Executive and considered that, for different reasons, the left parties – “will never accept layoffs and cuts” – and from the right – “they will reject more money from TAP” – will not approve this agreement in Parliament. “It is a seriousness and irresponsibility that has no classification,” he said.
But André Teives proposed a solution for this “conjunctural stage”, because “all workers will need to respond when recovery arrives”, to which is associated the idea of wage reduction in exchange for maintaining employment: “A Government with the will and support of the President of the Republic, he will be able to lobby the European Union and reconfigure this legal format, leave the rescue and restructuring and enter the covid programs. How do you do it now? TAP requests a loan with State guarantee for the amount of X, and this X must include 1,200 million that have already entered to be returned to the public treasury. Leaving the format I mentioned, we are all free to negotiate, as all European and global airlines are doing. They can agree, as in the case of Lufthansa, a reduction of the global wage bill of 45% whose bargaining chip was not the layoffs. And among other things, workers gave up vacation pay, Christmas pay and productivity bonuses. “
“We accept to negotiate, nobody accepts impositions, which is what has been happening since the beginning of this process. And this is incredible, because a left government does not negotiate a line, a measure, with the unions, ”he accused. On the other hand, he raised the hypothesis of being accepted “part-time work with proportional payment of the amount equivalent to the work rendered, using a combination of layoffs and part-time.”
Denouncing that he had participated in a third meeting on the restructuring plan and that the workers continued to “not know anything”, Teives accused the Government of having chosen “the worst and most austere format of all for the intervention of the Portuguese State” and of himself . they have nothing to do with the pandemic, “since it has been in the legal framework of the European Union for 16 years.”
“The State has put ten TAPs in the banks”
André Teives acknowledged that Grupo TAP had “a negative equity that amounted to 584 million euros”, but recalled that this is “the corollary of years and years of ruinous businesses such as Maintenance and Engineering Brazil”, because, According to the union leader, “has already consumed TAP, between 2006 and today, almost a billion euros. I ask what would become of TAP with those one billion euros or without having ‘burned’ those one billion euros? “
In addition, he recalled the example of the German Condor, which had a restructuring and rescue plan approved by the European Commission in December 2019. “It was rescued with 380 million euros to avoid bankruptcy. In April of this year, that same airline received 550 million euros for temporary covid personnel ”. Teives reaffirmed that he alerted “the Government from the first hour” about “the effects and consequences of the format chosen in June”, stating that those involved in the process should be aware of what happened with Condor.
The union leader confessed his outrage at the order, given by the Government to TAP, to “leave the recovery support measures in force to protect employment since December, something that is, at least, surreal”, because “nothing prevents the access to regulatory frameworks and extraordinary legislation due to the pandemic ”. All this “so that the law is fulfilled in advance and can be dismissed,” he said. “If these measures that come from the European Commission are to protect employment, how can we not use them when we can?”
Another issue raised by André Teives was the difference in attitudes between executives. “When privatization took place, a right-wing government accepted that workers should influence the specifications” and cited resolution 24/2015 of the Presidency of the Council of Ministers which, in practice, implied, for example, “the prohibition, in legal terms, from the recourse to collective dismissal until the end of the 30-month period from the conclusion of the direct sale contract or while the State maintains a shareholding position, whichever occurs later ”. And he emphasized: “The State increased its position to 72.5% and wants to fire. But to do so, he will have to revoke this resolution, perhaps in the Assembly of the Republic. Once again, the world was turned upside down: a right-wing government put protectionist measures in the labor field; and a government of the left will revoke them to the fire ”.
And he did not stop remembering that “the Portuguese State has already placed billions in banks, ten TAP, and now for TAP… Banks do not induce in the economy what TAP induces, not in terms of employment, of created wealth, the more than 300 million euros per year that enter the state coffers as a result of labor taxes, and all that is now at risk due to the chosen format and that is incredible ”.
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