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On July 18, 2012, Prosegur security guards in Paraguay walked of the job for an 8-day strike. For 7 months the parties were unable to reach an agreement over important worker issues. The union was contacted earlier this week by the company, indicating that they wanted to return to the bargaining table. The union agreed and in an act of good faith they called off the strike in anticipation of reaching agreement at the bargaining table. However, when the striking workers returned to their jobs, they were fired, 250 of them, including all the union activists.



UNI and the UNI Prosegur Alliance, have demanded the immediate reinstatement of these workers and a cessation to further anti-union behaviour from the company in Paraguay. These firings are in conflict with well-recognized international standards, norms and ethics and they are an outrage to all trade unionists.



Workers have the right to engage in collective bargaining. This strike was concerted activity in support of these negotiations. Key issues in the strike include excessive and undercompensated hours of work, unsafe working conditions, persecution of union activists and lack of job protection, including the right to summarily terminate long-term employees. The UNI Prosegur Alliance unions (a global alliance of security unions in UNI) met with Prosegur global HR staff in May 2011 in Madrid, and reported that a number of worker problems, such as these, had been reported to them by Prosegur security guards in Chile, Uruguay, Brazil and Portugal when they visited these countries on a fact-finding mission in 2011. So, these worker problems are not isolated to Paraguay. They are serious systemic problems that need a corporate-wide resolution.



As UNI Global Union said in a letter to the Prosegur CEO in Madrid, Christian Gut Reveredo, it believes that Prosegur should be a leader in improving standards for security guards on a global level, not one of the employers that holds standards down and the engages in actions that are designed to intimidate union activists and other workers committed to improving their lives.



UNI also noted in our letter to the CEO that Prosegur’s actions to fire and replace striking workers in Paraguay takes place in a country where a democratically elected government was removed in June, in what has been described by other heads of state in the region as a coup. The current Paraguayan government was never elected and is not currently recognised by any South American country. Paraguay is clearly a state with weak institutions, which allows companies, if they choose, to be able to exploit deficiencies in the rule of law. In this environment, UNI called on Prosegur to be one of the companies that continues to uphold international norms and ethics despite operating in a politically troubled state.



UNI asked for direct intervention by the Prosegur CEO in Madrid to get this situation resolved. Our demands are that workers be immediately reinstated and that good faith collective negotiations should resume at once. We indicated that time is of the essence and called on the company to resolve this issue no later than Monday, August 6, 2012.