A squad of 20 rebar workers on the Lobres-Taramay section of the A-7 stopped work for one day because they still hadn’t been paid their December wages.
They timed the stoppage to coincide with the arrival of two cranes, each one costing the Ministry of Public Works (Fomento) between 200 and 300 euros an hour. Their rebar work – the welded, iron framework inside concrete pillars etc – was essential, so their gesture was more than noted.
You would be wrong to think that these men are on juicy salaries, because they have no holidays, no overtime and earn around six euros an hour, meaning that they’re working on average ten hours a day to make ends meet… and they’re out there in all weathers.
“The Ministry has given orders to accelerate the pace on the A-7, but this incident is outside our responsibility,” explained a provincial representative for the Central Government, Santiago Pérez. But this stoppage isn’t the real problem; the real problem is what has happened in one of the tunnels, but we will come to that.
The problem with the rebar workers is the same one as always: the Government puts the job up to bid, a company, in this case Fomento Construcciones y Contratas wins the contract and then subcontracts the rebar work out to another company, in this case Armasur, who then subcontract it out again to even smaller companies.
“One stopped paying us and since then we have been passed along through three other companies with promises that they were going to pay us. If we had known that it was a lie, we would have dropped the job and gone on the dole,” said one of the workers. According to these same workers, colleagues working on the Gorgoracha-Puntálon section also have the same problem.
It was not only a case of not being able to put any food on the table that pushed the workers to strike on that particular day, but also because finding the money to pay for the gasoline to come to work is also becoming increasingly difficult, so when a big-wig (important person) from the Ministry came down to say that if they were determined to stop work, they should at least let the machinery operators do their work, they refused to budge.
Meanwhile, over in one of the tunnels, a problem has cropped up which will probably mean that the Ministry will have to find an extra 20m euros and redraw the plans. Sebastian Pérez would only say that the situation required “a complicated extraction,” whatever that might mean, but will probably mean a delay in the opening of this much needed section of the A-7
(News: Costa Tropical, Granada, Andalucia)