Friday, March 29

Carriers stop their trucks to protest their conditions


The transport sector continues to live in turbulent times, as evidenced by the strike announced for Monday, March 14, which has been joined by drivers from the National Transport Platform, basically drivers, freelancers and small and medium-sized companies. The spokesman for this group in the region, Germán Martínez, pointed out this morning that the situation for them is “unsustainable” and therefore, according to his data, around 1,800 road professionals have stopped working in the region today. From Asemtraex (Association of Transport Entrepreneurs of Extremadura), another sectoral organization that does not support this strike, they minimize the effects of this lockout and speak of informational pickets in Plasencia, Mérida and Miajadas without major incidents in road transport.

According to Germán Martínez, from the platform that promotes the strike, the main claim is the rise in fuel prices, but they also protest the “precarious conditions” in which drivers work, the low profit margin they obtain on their freight , when they don’t lose money during their shift, according to Martínez “because sometimes the price of the work is less than the cost of doing it.” In addition, another claim is that drivers only have to limit themselves to driving, not to loading and unloading tasks at the docks, which is an abuse for the members of the National Platform of Carriers.

Those who have promoted this indefinite strike also complain of “strategies that from the administrations have allowed coexistence within the sector to be increasingly divided and abundant in terms of the number of trucks to offer the same service in unequal conditions.”

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According to Martínez, today, Monday, there are stopped trucks and information points in the main towns of the region, and the strike will be indefinite until the central administration sits down to talk with this group.

Other organizations in the sector, such as Asemtraex, have not supported this strike. The first echoes the position of the Spanish Confederation of Freight Transport (CEMT), which, although it calls for “urgent measures” to limit the escalation in fuel prices, rejects the strike called today in order not to affect the supply chain at a delicate moment like the current one due to the war in Ukraine. «Once we return to a more normalized scenario, without the disproportionate and daily increase that the war in Ukraine is causing in the price of fuel, thanks to the Agreements reached on December 17 and published by the Royal Decree-Law in the BOE of March 2, carriers have the necessary tool to solve normal variations in fuel prices, such as the mandatory review clause of the price of transport based on the cost of fuel, “says the CETM, confederation to which Asemtraex belongs.

According to the manager of Asemtraex in Extremadura, Alonso Sánchez, “the platform that has called the strike asks for mandatory minimum prices and this is already prohibited by law and only served to fine those who worked below those minimum prices.” For Sánchez, there is already a legal tool, published in the BOE on March 2, by which if the price of fuel increases more than 5% from the time the order is made to the carrier until it is executed, it can be reflected in the invoice. of the charger.

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Finally, Sánchez asks that the pickets that exist today on the region’s highways and transport hubs “be informative, not coercive,” and reminds employees that this is not a strike but a lockout.


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