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The Portuguese drivers who were stranded on the UK-French border over Christmas are now back. Although that part of the problem has been overcome, the economic losses caused by this strike, in addition to the salary increases for drivers that are scheduled for January, are worrying employers, who are preparing to request a meeting with the Government.
The impasse began when France decided to order the closure of the border with the United Kingdom last Sunday night, after a new strain of coronavirus was discovered in England. This meant that thousands of truck drivers, including some 300 Portuguese, were stranded and forced to spend the night inside their trucks. At this time, on the afternoon after Christmas Day, “the situation is already settled”, guarantees the spokesman for the National Association of Public Transport of Goods by Road (Antram), André Matias de Almeida. “We do not know that there are still drivers arrested; those who have not yet returned are in transit ”.
Even so, the stoppage of several days will have caused serious losses. On December 23, Antram informed the Lusa agency about an impact of more than three million euros in direct losses. Now, to Expresso, André Matias de Almeida recalls that the “economic losses” that companies have suffered these days “add up to a huge salary burden in January this year, with the State Budgets and the indexation to the national minimum wage.”
That is, after two stoppages with great impact in 2019, in which the Government intervened directly as an intermediary, the negotiations to which the employer and driver unions dictated an increase of 11.1% in the salary table for heavy drivers, among other modifications introduced in the vertical collective work contract. The unions’ demands also included the indexation of wages to the value of the national minimum wage, which in January will increase by 30 euros (from 635 to 665 euros).
Now drivers’ bosses are now complaining that this salary burden, added to the losses they have suffered these days, will be even more difficult to carry out. “This will be an increase that these companies will not even be able to support”, warns André Matias de Almeida.
Recognizing that the Government “could do little” in the face of the border situation, which placed drivers “in inhumane conditions” and unable to spend Christmas with their families, the spokesperson now poses a new challenge to the Executive. “Antram will request a meeting with the government on this situation and on the increase in wages indexed to the minimum wage, because it is unaffordable,” he says.
During the days when the Portuguese drivers were detained, the Government was present in the English Channel, where it stationed a team of four to distribute water and food to the truckers. Now, a new confrontation may come, this time with the bosses.
