Telecontact call center workers will be on strike for the whole day on Monday 17 November and from 18 November to 16 December they will abstain from work every day at the end of the shift.
This was announced by the unions in defense of the 1,591 Telecontact workers that «the Tim Group wants to outsource by selling them to DNA, an LLC with a share capital of just 10 thousand euros, a small amount that raises suspicion and worries». A corporate operation that the confederal unions consider “reckless and carried out for the sole purpose of getting rid of 1,591 employees – 80% women – and which they strongly oppose”.
Monday’s strike will be accompanied by demonstrations and initiatives in the cities affected: in Rome, where Telecontact workers number 336, Slc Cgil and Uilcom Uil will hold a demonstration from 9.30am under the Poste Italiane headquarters in viale Europa 190. Workers from Naples (303 employed) and L’Aquila where 30 employees are at risk will also converge here. From 9.30am on Monday, workers from Catanzaro (433 employees at risk, here also a procession), Caltanissetta (336) Ivrea (89) and Aosta (30).
«Poste Italiane (whose majority shareholder is the State through the Ministry of Finance and Cassa Depositi e Prestiti) is the reference shareholder of Tim and the unions ask that it make its intentions more understandable with respect to the prospects of the Tim Group. The institutions strike a blow – they declare – and clarify the plan whose outline began with the transfer of the network and which to date does not yet seem concluded”.
«We want to tell Tim (which declared revenues of 10 billion in the third quarter of this year) that we have well understood the nature of this operation, which has no industrial design and is aimed exclusively at reducing costs. An operation which will have the sole consequence of expelling Telecontact workers from the Tim Group, throwing them into the troubled world of outsourcers which certainly does not need additional manpower but which, on the contrary, is expected to show an opposite trend in the coming years. Instead of continuing with the dismemberment of the Tim Group – states the national secretariat of Slc Cgil – it would be appropriate for the professionalism present in Telecontact to be exploited and the workers, who have consolidated skills and abilities and an average age at least 15 years younger than that of the parent company’s employees, to be valorised and not expelled. After the transfer of the network we would have imagined a reverse path: not a further transfer, rather an internalisation, with a possible professional reconversion to be managed without traumas, given the many activities that Tim manages internally”. “The confederal union – concludes the note – will counteract this operation with all necessary means to guarantee stability for Telecontact workers – the vast majority part-time – for whom Tim is canceling a peaceful working future”.
Telecontact, Tridico: «Grotesque dispute, we will support the strike proclaimed for November 17th»
«The Telecontact dispute is taking on increasingly grotesque features. Even the latest confrontation between the unions and Tim to try to avoid the transfer of 1591 employees – 432 of which in Catanzaro and 302 in Naples – to a new company was unsuccessful. The plan to expel from the company perimeter the employees who have merged into a newly established company, in which Tim will only have minority shares, does not offer the workers any guarantees. The operation, according to the confederal acronyms, makes no sense and behind this move of industrial makeover, when the guarantee periods provided for by law end, there are new cuts in personnel. Everyone’s concern is that DNA, the newco that will absorb the 1591 workers and controlled by Gruppo Distribuzione – a customer care giant with over 3000 employees in our country and Eastern Europe – represents a tool for managing cuts and redundancies. Hence the opposition to a measure that offers no industrial perspective. We demonstrate solidarity and closeness to the workers and will support the strike called for November 17 and the two-hour abstention from work at the end of the shift the previous day.”
PCR Calabria supports the strike: clarity and transparency for Telecontact workers
“The world of work is not in good health. Decades spent hitting the rights of workers with pickaxes and giving free rein to unbridled liberalism, in which those in power decide what and how to produce, who can or cannot work, without a shred of industrial policy. Corporate restructuring and sales are moving along this line. In the middle, the weakest link: the workers. The Telecontact dispute falls into this case.
In Calabria, there are around 500 people who today live in total uncertainty regarding their future, after the sale of the business unit by TIM to DNA. We make the concerns of workers and trade unions our own, and we support the strike on November 17th. There is a need for clarity and transparency and, above all, a plan that respects employment and contractual guarantees.