A great victory added for the workers in Teleperformance!
How many of us have been downsized? One or even more times through the years!
How many of us have stayed unpaid for weeks or months “until the training date” or hearing that otherwise “we will be fired” as the HR has been informing us?
How many of us have counted the coins in our pockets to survive the month until the next training starts?
How many mums have had to borrow money to go the supermarket for their children’s food?
This illegal practice has been putting the burden of changing projects in the back of the workers, instead of the company who takes all the decisions for the workforce management and tasks assigned.
The Management of Teleperformance even reached to the awful point to threaten a colleague that they will be locked out of the computer for 5 days to appear as resigned, if they would not agree to sign unpaid leave during the downsizing to another department!
This atrocity was denounced with an open complaint of SETIP and SETIP Thessaloniki to the Ministry of Labour and the Labour Inspectorate. As a result of this complaint and our continuous strikes, and even before the tripartite meeting took place, Teleperformance paid back the days of “unpaid leave” to the colleague, for all the time they were waiting until the starting date in their new department! At the same time, a member of SETEP temporary Βoard also received a week of paid standby time between the last day in one department until the start of the next training without actually working! Both colleagues are working now on their new projects.
The inhumane lie that the workers have to wait on hold without salary whenever the company wants to move them from one project to another, safeguarding their profits in burden of our life, will end without united and decisive struggle! Unpaid leave can only be asked by the worker for their own personal reasons. Forced unpaid leave is illegal and totally unaccepted for any reason!
The Management has the obligation to plan ahead and inform early on for moving the workforce to other tasks. Two choices are only acceptable! Either we stay at our tasks until the first day of the next training or we get paid our normal wage whilst waiting! Any other information should be reported to the Union and fought against! Any colleague who has experienced this illegal practice in the period of the last 3 months can still report this to the union and claim their money back with a claim to the Labour Inspectorate.
Our movement has been fierce and gaining strenght and achievements day after day!!
On 1st of May we continue and escalate our victorious struggle for collective labor agreement and send a message to the company to start negotiations immediately, striking on the bloody steps of the millions of working class heroes and martyrs before us whose struggles achieved the 8hours of work, the social security system, the salary increases, the democratic and trade union liberties and all the workers’ rights that the big monopolies and the antilabour governments are fighting to reform the past decades. From Chicago in 1886 to the Athens May Day of 1894, from May 1936 in Thessaloniki to the May Day of 1944 with the heroic sacrifice of 200 communists in Kesariani, the working class has written with the indelible ink of its blood the most glorious pages of class, organised struggle and demand, which no state and no employer’s intimidations and repression can stop.
The International Workers Day is the biggest reminder, that “he who fights, can lose. He who doesn’t fight, has already lost” (B. Brecht) and that we can bring the world upside down if we believe in our own power (K. Varnalis).
1st of May is a Strike Day for the Workers in Teleperformance!
We protest at 08.00am in front of the TP Building in Gravias Pireas and at 10:00am at Pasalimani, Pireas