Key salmon industry pharmaceutical company causes a strike for almost a month in Chilean Patagonia
- Abbott and Aquagestión assure that they work “under high quality and safety standards guaranteeing the improvement of each of the production stages” for the salmon industry.
- The union claims that Aquagestión/Abbott workers are “responsible for approving product exports and marketing, ensuring that the food does not make end consumers sick”.
- Working women say that “wages are not enough to make ends meet”: their incomes do not allow them to have a “good living”, good health insurance, family welfare, good food, time to socialize and share, and not even to think about fair pensions and retirement.
Puerto Montt, October 22, 2024. (radiodelmar.cl)- The main pharmaceutical company that carries out sanitary and food safety tests for the salmon industry in the south of Chile, Aquagestión, owned by the multinational Abbott, has kept its historic work force, mainly women, on strike for more than 20 days.
Throughout October the local managers of Aquagestion/Abbott, according to the union, have been unwilling to engage in respectful dialogue and have kept people working as replacements who do not know the whole system or the delicate ways of carrying out sanitary samples for the salmon industry.
The union's demands are: a better pay, a good collective bargaining termination bonus and better and respectful day-to-day treatment for workers and especially for women workers.
Aquagestión has more than 200 employees, located between Concepción and Punta Arenas.
Abbott/Aquagestión works in the areas of food safety, chromatography, animal health, fish and mollusk pathology. On their website Abbott and Aquagestión assure that they work “under high quality and safety standards guaranteeing the improvement of each of the production stages” for the salmon industry.
Aquagestión S.A. and Farmacología en Acuacultura Veterinaria S. A. (FAV) belong to the Veterinary Division of the U.S. pharmaceutical company Abbott Laboratories, which, in 2016, purchased the popular Recalcine laboratory from the Chilean group CFR Pharmaceuticals (Corporación Farmacéutica Recalcine).
Abbott’s local managers in Chile
Throughout the legal collective bargaining between the company and the union, local managers have behaved disrespectfully, intransigently and without considering that they are part of an international company that must respect human rights standards and multinational labor agreements.
The union claims that Aquagestión/Abbott workers are “responsible for approving product exports and marketing, ensuring that the food does not make end consumers sick”.
Salmon produced in southern Chile is exported mainly to the United States, Europe, China and Brazil. In 2023 Chilean salmon exports exceeded US$ 6 billion.
But working women say that “wages are not enough to make ends meet”: wages do not allow them to have a “good living”, good health, family welfare, good food, time for socializing and sharing, and not even to think about fair pensions and retirement.
“Our salaries are insufficient to cover basic needs, while the Abbott company generates billions of dollars in sales worldwide they don't care about their own workers, who perform the fundamental tasks for the operation of the company.”
“We need to resolve this collective bargaining conflict, we have been on strike for 22 days now.”
“Our management represented by Roberto Sutterman, Guillermo Stau and Fabiola Delgado, preferred to lose approximately $500 million in sales before disbursing less than $10 million to increase the pay of lower-income workers,” the union says.
The multinational reached sales in excess of $10 billion to date in the first half of 2024, says the
union.
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