Telmex union opens the door to reduce the amount of retirement

After several months of negotiation, the Union of Telephone Operators of the Mexican Republic (STRM) remains firm in the demand for almost 2,000 jobs, it will even ask that they be covered in the first semester of 2023. But it could be flexible in the amount of retirements to end the conflict.

Those were the two main reasons that led the STRM to go on strike in July, 37 years after its last strike at Teléfonos de México (Telmex). “We are putting together a proposal to solve this, it would be a slightly lower retirement than the current ones, but there would be retirement, that is guaranteed,” Francisco Hernández Juárez, leader of the union, stated in an interview.

In the coming days, the national leadership will submit to the consideration of the base of workers the offer that they would present to the company owned by Carlos Slim, the richest man in Latin America.

The proposal contains a retirement table with amounts according to age and years of service and the percentages of benefits to be considered to calculate the pension, says Francisco Hernández, also collegiate president of the National Union of Workers (UNT). “Once the agreement is ready and the assembly approves it, the workers ratify it by secret vote throughout the country,” he details, it will be presented by Telmex.

In the 2020 contract review, the company asked the union to accept that the new staff did not have a direct retirement through the company, or complement the one granted via the Retirement Fund Administrators (Afores), explains Hernández Juárez. “We were willing to support the company, but not in that, because what it offered is already in the law.”

Seats for all Telmex areas

As of the third quarter of 2020, Telmex’s earnings were 67,973 million pesosaccording to the 2020 Telecommunications Sector Financial Report. “In recent years the company’s revenues have been affected,” the report added.

The declines began in 2015 and “the adverse effects of covid-19 on the economy had a negative impact on revenue the second quarter of 1.4%”, according to the report.

In 2009, the STRM agreed to modify the collective bargaining agreement (CCT) to raise retirement age from 53 to 60 years for men. But women added more years, exactly 12, when they went from 48 to 60 years of age.

They also increased years of service to be able to retire, from a minimum of 25 to 29 years. It also allowed the company to reduce the concepts for calculating the integrated daily salary (SDI) for the pension from eight to five.

In 2015, given the economic situation presented by the company, it was agreed to once again increase the minimum retirement age from 60 to 65 years for men and women. It was also granted to eliminate one more concept for calculating the SDI, so now it is made up of only four.

This is how they arrived at the 2019 salary review, in which the STRM asked the company 1,942 places and Telmex approved it. “Every year we agreed on 2,000, 5,000 positions, depending on the need for personnel that arose,” explains Francisco Hernández. Over the course of the following year, he details, before the deadline for the next revision expired, the company opened the calls and applied the exams, selected the personnel and hired them.

“But in 2020 he told us that he was not going to comply with the vacancies because his finances were not being the best.” He also asked them to remove retirement of newly hired staff And who will come in the future?

It has been almost three years of discussions in which “the company simply did not want to withdraw its proposal. We presented several of them”, until last July 21 they went on strike. A day later, with the mediation of the Ministry of Labor and Social Welfare (STPS), they lifted the strike and have been in negotiations ever since.

“The Secretariat is helping us a lot,” says the leader. “We hope this will be resolved before the end of the year. Hopefully, because the company, with this lawsuit, to take care of the pennies, has neglected the pesos. You have to take care of your customers and the company’s main customers are the workers”.

According to the union leader, in other conditions the selection process for assign the places It has been a year, “but we have a much larger deficit than the 1,942 we have requested since 2019.” So they will have to be covered in six months.

The profiles that are required, he explains, “are for the entire structure, from administrative posts in the traffic areas, operators, services to commercial clients, going through the internal and external technical areas. They all lack staff.”

Francisco Hernández trusts that the labor conflict be resolved in the next few days. “I see many possibilities, we need this to end to focus on our fundamental responsibility, which is to get the company back to the leadership it had in the early 2000s.”