“Nestlé has refused to budge from its initial proposal, and ever since the mediation began with the good offices stage, the company has held on to its rigid and even arrogant stance toward us,” Blas de Mir Pidal, president of the Number 2 Union of Graneros, told La Rel.
The union leader, who has been participating in the negotiations, said he could not believe the position adopted in Chile by the Swiss multinational corporation.
“Today we shared the company’s last proposal with our rank-and-file members and they obviously rejected it categorically, so we are launching the strike,” he noted.
In a meeting with the mediation lawyers and the union, which was scheduled for today, at 1 p.m. Chile time, the company once again showed its contempt for these processes of negotiation.
“The mediation was over in less than 5 minutes. We really don’t understand what Nestlé’s policy in this case is, why it insists on not budging even a bit. We don’t know what it’s trying to achieve,” Blas says.
According to the unionist, the company does not realize the major damage that this behavior is doing to its corporate image in Chile, and in Ecuador as well.
“The company,” he adds, “wants us to accept what it imposes without even a margin for negotiation. It argues that it has already signed agreements with the other organizations (yellow unions) and that it wants all the unions to have the same conditions, but the Graneros and Los Ángeles factories are large and it can offer better conditions to its workers there.”
Nestlé Chile also does not understand that this negotiation process is regulated by local labor laws, which it ignores.
“We are grateful for the support we’ve received from our sister organizations in Latin America. Everything that can be done to make the Nestlé parent company in Switzerland aware of the conflict it’s having here with the unions will be very important, and for that we can count on the unconditional support of Felatran and of the IUF,” he concluded.