The IUF-affiliated Beverage and Related Industry Workers’ Union (STIBYS) called on the Ministry of Labor to intervene in order to stop the continuous abuses by Cervecería Hondureña, owned by AB InBev, against the rights of employees.
In a letter addressed to the Deputy Minister of Labor, Olvin Villalobos, the union demands the payment of wages to the more than 200 workers over 60 years of age or with pre-existing health issues who cannot work due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
“Since March, most of these workers have not been paid, they are hungry and the company wants to force them to resign,” STIBYS notes in its letter.
STIBYS also denounces that the company has replaced 800 permanent workers with as many outsourced workers supplied by companies “that are nothing more than labor force traffickers created by AB InBev to violate the collective bargaining agreement and make employment precarious.
“Cervecería Hondureña has been given the task, in recent years, of granting supermarkets and warehouses huge discounts and royalties. As a result the distribution trucks of the same company, lose their customers” the text says.
“With these discounts and royalties, supermarkets sell beer and soft drinks cheaper than the trucks distributing products, thus workers are losing many of these distribution jobs,” he says.
The company also violates a clause of the collective agreement that obliges it to respect the career ladder of its employees, by not filling vacant positions with permanent workers.
To make matters worse, the management summoned the STIBYS board on October 8, 2020 to communicate sanctions that they plan to execute to some of its members due to organizing protest actions in front of the company’s premises.
As its premises are closed due to the pandemic, the Ministry of Labor has so far remained unaware of this problem.
Please find the original news story in Spanish here.
