If there is a truly hard job, it is that of an employee in a slaughterhouse. Especially because, for many years, very precarious working conditions were added to the intense physical and mental conditions, in which fraud and exploitation abounded, and which now the outbreak of African swine fever (ASF) that has appeared in the Collserola mountain (Barcelona) has once again brought to the fore. In slaughterhouses, cutting plants and the production of meat products – especially in the former, where the vast majority of workers are immigrants with pressing economic needs and often little or not organized in unions, without command of the language or knowledge of their rights – the large companies in the sector throughout Spain used the figures of the false cooperative and the false self-employed, until pressure from the unions and fines from the Labor Inspection forced them to dismantle the fraud, already before the pandemic. Since then, the sector, the unions explain, has changed a lot and companies generally comply with the law. But precariousness remains high and dubious practices persist.
“These are very hard manual jobs, whoever can run away from these jobs,” explains Alícia Buil, secretary of the agri-food sector of UGT-Fica in Catalonia. The profile of slaughterhouse workers is that of people of migrant origin, with great economic needs to send money to their countries, and with few other options than this. Buil considers that it is “painful” for society that second generations of migrants also continue to work in these sectors. “All jobs are decent, but this one is very hard, and also the slaughterhouses do not make the necessary investments to prevent the work from being so heavy,” he explains. Josep Rueda, general secretary of Industry of CC OO in Catalonia, affirms that the precariousness of the sector is explained because working conditions have been precarious for a long time: “Companies took advantage of precariousness squared. Basically they had workers who were not paid for vacations or insurance or PPE. It was a situation almost of slavery: people who cut themselves while working and the Red Cross came and did not want to go to the hospital, they said they wanted four points and continue working, because they needed it,” explains Rueda.
In this environment without knowledge of labor rights, with language barriers and many economic needs, union organization was very complicated, but the model of false cooperatives ended up sanctioned and judicialized — they were in false cooperatives, there were fines and sanctions from the Labor Inspection and sentences —, and thousands of workers were regularized. The unions demanded that the workers become part of the permanent staff of the companies, and this was generally fulfilled, but now the swine fever crisis has brought to light practices that the unions ask to investigate.
On Thursday, the Government gave the green light to the first and only temporary employment regulation file (ERTE) related to swine fever. The ERTE had been requested by CGTPlus, a temporary employment company (ETT) for 458 of its workers. These were assigned as temporary employees to four slaughterhouses in Santa Eugènia de Berga, in the Barcelona region of Osona, four companies that belong to the Aragonese meat company Grupo Jorge.
The outbreak of ASF, a very lethal virus among wild boars and pigs, two weeks after its beginning in a focus of six kilometers in which 16 dead wild boars with ASF have been found. Despite being very focused and despite the fact that the virus does not spread to other species or humans, the outbreak has had a very important impact on the pork markets, since its spread in pig farms could be catastrophic for the sector. The outbreak led to the automatic closure of export markets, although they have been reopening (for example, China or South Korea, which continue to buy pork products from Spain except those that come from the affected area), and also led to a drop in wholesale prices.
Faced with the threat that the outbreak could spread, the slaughterhouses that Grupo Jorge has in Osona, an area relatively close to Barcelona, decided to temporarily paralyze their activity and therefore dispense with ETT employees. This, in turn, requested an ERTE due to force majeure to temporarily suspend the contracts of its workers. But this is the only file requested, while the rest of the companies in the sector have continued working.
Rueda explains that the Government has asked the Ministry of Labor to activate the RED mechanism for the ERTE approved due to force majeure. In this way, all workers who are within the ERTE would be entitled to a benefit. Until the mechanism is activated, only workers who have been in the company for more than a year will be entitled to aid. And in a sector as precarious as this one, turnover is very high, so it is not clear how many of the affected workers will meet the requirements to receive the benefit.
Beyond the ERTE, Rueda explains that this episode forces us to increase attention to the use of ETTs in the sector. “The labor reform says that when a company needs a job for its operations, that position must be permanent. It is true that in the meat sector there are production peaks in which temporary workers are needed, but we have to find out if these 458 workers were really temporary or did the job as permanent workers,” he says. Buil recalls that the Jorge Group “has always escaped legality” and asks the Labor Inspection to investigate how long these workers had been in their jobs. “We are in favor of the ERTE, but we want it to get to the bottom of the matter,” he explains.
In any case, the unions celebrate that there has only been one ERTE request, and that the labor impact of swine fever is currently limited. “There has been one since the outbreak was detected,” highlights Buil.
