Voluntary adherence to the labor regulation file (ERE) proposed by MasOrgange only brought this Sunday to a total of 217, far from the 650 employees the company intends to get rid of. This represents an affiliation of 33.34%, while the membership period will end this Wednesday, November 6, as union sources indicated to Europa Press.
In mid-October, the company concluded the agreement with UGT and Fetico for an ERE which will involve 650 people at MasOrange, the telecommunications company resulting from the merger of Orange and MásMóvil. This decision did not have the support of CCOO, which rejects the agreed conditions and considers that it was not going to be “strictly voluntary”.
MasOrange communicated on September 3 its intention to propose this measure for a maximum of 795 workers, after having detected “organizational duplications” following the integration of the Orange and MásMóvil workforce. However, during negotiations with the unions, this figure was reduced to 650 and the possibility of early retirement and incentive layoffs is offered.
This ERE concerns six companies in the group: Orange Spain, Orange España Comunicaciones Fijas, Xfera Móviles, Lorca telecom Bidco, R Cable, Telecable and Euskatel, a Basque operator acquired by MásMóvil in 2021.
The president of the Euskaltel works council, Javier de Blanco (CCOO), denounced that among the people who took advantage of the ERE, there are already some who are “forced volunteers”. According to him, the fact that only this figure has been reached so far reflects the fact that the conditions established did not invite workers to voluntarily join the ERE. The representative of CCOO, who believes that the ERE will end up being “completed by forced workers”, indicated that he does not have a breakdown of the people who took refuge in the different centers and, therefore, does not know the exact number of workers who joined the ERE in Euskaltel.
For its part, the UGT declared that voluntary memberships to the ERE so far are “far from the company’s expectations” and that they “respond both to staff discontent and to the campaign undertaken by CCOO, as a non-signatory union. , who have staked their political credentials on the fact that, as they claimed, this is a largely forced collective dismissal.”
This is why the UGT has expressed its desire for a “significant” incorporation of volunteering, at a time when the “lack of coherence of this union (in reference to the CCOO) is demonstrated, because while it is campaigning against volunteering and the ERA, three of the five permanent members of the negotiating table have ratified their demands to adhere to the agreed conditions. “This incongruous attitude is reinforced by the designation of a delegate who was also part of the table,” added the UGT.
