WORLD WORLDWIDE EUROPE SPAIN - news information UPDATE - (en) Spain, CNT #438: Home help - CNT La Felguera (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 Humanity faces the challenge of care from a neoliberal perspective that

deeply attacks the basic values and principles of a society that profits
from the support and care of our elderly. ---- The home help service is
in a deep situation of privatization that affects both the people who
access this resource and the workers themselves. ---- Mainly the workers
who participate in this sector are women and respond to two different
categories, on the one hand, social workers in charge of coordinating,
managing and organizing the service, and on the other, home help
assistants, the main protagonists being those closest to dependent
people and with care functions such as hygiene, feeding, medication
control, emotional support...

The multinationals that access the public tenders for this service are
concerned with generating income more than with the situation of
dependents and workers, to which the town councils for their part do not
respond with an exhaustive control of the service and with the
implementation of improvements for both groups (workers and dependents).

The platform for the home help service in Asturias has been denouncing
situations of injustice and abuse by these companies for several years.
The most notable are the recognition of occupational diseases, both
ergonomic and psychosocial, the reduction coefficient for early
retirement and the remunicipalisation of the service.

Their demands also include disagreement with the mileage for workers in
rural areas, since these workers use their own car to travel from one
home to another. The companies use the "google method" to pay the
mileage amount, which is none other than calculating the kilometres
through GOOGLE MAPS, taking into account that this APP in certain places
does not recognise rural roads and that it does not take into account
unforeseen events such as animals, traffic lights or traffic. This
situation has unfortunately also had an impact on the employees since
the new agreements of the town councils have decided to subtract five
minutes from the time of their service so that the workers have more
time to travel. The system is afraid of requiring the travel required by
companies and prefers to cut the rights of the most vulnerable people.

On the other hand, workers also denounce the hour pool. A method used to
cover up overtime as ordinary hours... this pool is used as a loose bag
of hours, anything goes for the hour pool, working days are reduced as
far as contracts are concerned, but more hours are worked by including
them in the famous hour pool. When a dependent person does not have
service because they have a hospital appointment, the business tendency
is to discount that hour of service from the worker, generating a
negative hour pool. Some workers propose to use that hour for another
person or to support another colleague in the service, even so, it is an
unfair situation since they do not refuse to perform the service and
sometimes the company charges the entire hour and they only 15 minutes
of that hour.

In relation to the recognition of occupational diseases, it is a
continuous demand that brings about serious problems, because many
workers see their physical or mental capacities diminished due to
continuous efforts and repetitive tasks that lead to the development of
ailments that are not recognized or assessed by companies or medical
inspections. It is worth highlighting the incoherence of a system that
claims to value care, carried out mainly by women, but which, when it
comes down to it, is not capable of estimating the illnesses that these
jobs cause, and which increase the gender gap in the recognition of
occupational diseases.

Female colleagues in a protest attitude
 From the point of view of service management, social workers also find
themselves very limited. Every year or two years we witness a change of
company, which entails a change of methodology, computer system,
guidelines and, in many cases, personnel. In most cases, we are also
entrusted with the management of telephone on-call calls. While city
councils ask companies for a contact telephone number from eight in the
morning to ten at night from Monday to Sunday, companies accept this
service, overloading the service coordinators, who often do not rest and
must manage incidents at any time of the day, whether you are eating,
resting, at the gym or sleeping.

The companies that manage these services have not specialized in social
and health care services, but after the housing crisis in 2008 they have
been able to redirect their work activity towards booming businesses to
continue increasing their profits and speculating with the service, the
people and the workers.

This is my case in which I was fired on November 17, 2023 after
informing my pregnancy to the person in charge of the home help service
in Asturias. I worked as a coordinator of the Home Help service for the
council of Siero and I was 5 months pregnant. Once this event occurred,
I contacted the CNT Felguera who is giving me full support. The CNT
contacted the HR manager to let him know how illegal the dismissal was
and to demand his immediate reinstatement. However, the response from
the person who should be in charge of ensuring good labour relations and
conciliation within the company (even more so in a company that has the
certification of "Responsible Company") was the categorical refusal to
reinstate the person and with a cocky attitude he ended the call by
hanging up the phone.

The service offered by Ingesan OHLA, the company awarded the contract
for the service of the council of Siero, should have a marked social
character and public attention, let us not forget that it is in charge
of ensuring the attention of our elderly, it is focused like all the
companies that bid for our public services on obtaining the maximum
profitability by overloading their workers with work. These services,
which should be public to ensure the respect and quality of the service
for the users, as well as for their workers, are outsourced to
multinationals for the sake of an "optimization" that is only reflected
in the increase of benefits for their shareholders.

Therefore; From the CNT La Felguera we demand my reinstatement at work,
as well as the effective supervision of the Siero City Council in labour
practices to avoid abuse by multinationals and the impact on the service
provided to people. Right now we are waiting for the trial that will
take place on March 6th in which this labour conflict will be resolved
judicially since verbal negotiation has not been possible.

Even so, it has served to continue raising many cases of abuse with more
women working within SADs or nursing homes where they suffer from
similar conditions. With low wages, no recognition of occupational
diseases, precarious working hours and denied breaks.
We continue in the fight!!

They for money, we for dignity.

https://www.cnt.es/noticias/la-ayuda-a-domicilio/
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