After twelve days of work stoppages in the road freight transport sector, which has caused the shortage of some products on supermarket shelves and the stoppage of activity in many factories, the Government tried to put an end to the protests through of an agreement with the National Committee for Road Transport (CNTC) with more than 1,000 million euros in aid for the sector. But the minority organization of self-employed and SMEs that has called the strike and that has not participated in the negotiations with the Executive, Platform in Defense of the Transport Sector, insists that it will maintain the strike, as its main demand is not included in the pact: the immediate prohibition of working at a loss, according to what its leader assured this Friday, Manuel Hernandezafter meeting with the Minister of Transport, Rachel Sanchez, at the ministry headquarters.
“We have no choice but to continue in the same situation in which we were, we trust that the next few days will rethink everything that we have been explaining to you. Our situation is chaotic, very serious. It costs us more money to go to work“, Hernández said upon leaving the meeting around 7 in the afternoon, after two hours of meeting. The response could be foreseen after, after the agreement with the CNTC at dawn, the Platform attended a demonstration in the morning in Madrid that welcomed thousands of truck drivers (4,000 according to the Government Delegation and 10,000 according to the Police), according to reports Pablo Allen desalazar.
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Precisely when Hernández was in full concentration, Rachel Sanchez announced on Spanish Television that he would meet in the afternoon with the representative of the Platform to “explain” the pact reached with the National Committee for Road Transport (CNTC), thus reversing his own words, since a few days ago he assured that he was not going to “sit with a group of radicals that they are acting with violence & rdquor ;. Hernández asked the minister to apologize to her group and she justified her words by assuring that “she was referring to specific cases without trying to generalize”, as explained by the trucker.
But the crucial request was something else: “a transitory royal decree law” that prohibits working at a loss while the Government prepares a text of bill to apply to the sector the principles of Food Chain Law that the Government undertook to present before June 31 within its agreement with the CNTC. And the Executive’s response was negative, although the representative of the truckers keeps the door open for the minister so that she “calls him when she considers it appropriate.” “I have told him that in these circumstances I could not, under any circumstances, propose a dismissal because it is not taking place answer to the underlying problem“, Hernández explained. “We need a guarantee that if we start on Monday it will be without losing moneywithout that guarantee we cannot call off this strike”, he insisted because, as he argued, “when you it costs less money to be unemployed than to be workingin the worst of circumstances it will always be more convenient not to start than to start“, he insisted.