Striking workers demand compensation for liquidation of Correios de Moçambique

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Striking workers demand compensation for liquidation of Correios de Moçambique

12:31 CAT | 18 Feb 2022

Photo: O País

Employees of Correios de Moçambique in Maputo city are on strike and demanding compensation for the company’s liquidation. The strikers say that the management of the state-owned postal service and the Institute for the Management of State Holdings (IGEPE) promised to pay them, but never actually met the workers.

“They are giving us retirement letters, and this money is not fair,” complained Constantino Vasco, a former employee.

What would be fair, the 350 workers say, would be the payment of compensation for their years of work.

“I worked at the Mozambique Post Office for 23 years. They even robbed me. I completed 23 years of work six months ago and this is not on the document. When the government spoke, it said that none of the workers would lose their rights and we would have everything, but now they are giving us the letters telling us to stay at home without the thirteenth salary and holiday allowance from last year. I need to go home with the compensation money,” Vasco says.

Strikers say that Correios de Moçambqiue is sending workers retirement documents telling them to remain at home, where they will be informed about subsequent steps.

But the workers think otherwise.

“If it is the company that says it is being wound up, first it would have had to organize for the workers to be at home with their due payments and not to be waiting for the promise of a company that today announces its extinction, not by the will of the workers, but by itself,” observes Sérgio Manhiça, another Correios de Moçambique employee.

The workers claim that they made several requests to meet the Institute for the Management of State Holdings (IGEPE) and with the Correios de Moçambique liquidation commission, but without success.

“At no time did the government or company management come to meet the trade union committee and explain how the process of releasing workers, payment of compensation and regularisation of retirement pensions would unfold. Now, we have started receiving documents disassociating us from the company, but with no commitment on the part of the company regarding when we will receive our compensation. In the meantime, the company still owes workers who have not been paid the thirteenth salary and for holidays in 2021,” another employee, Ivanilda Madede, explained.

Some workers, however, think they know when they will receive their salaries.

“We have already started to receive the letters, those of us who are up there (in management), but they only say that this month we will receive pay at the Post Office, and next month it will be at the Finanças [Finance bureau]. But we have been working for many years. It’s a life and our youth which ended here. We are not against the company, but it is our right. Something to survive,” employee Florinda Meca says.

Correios de Moçambique was created as a state company in 1981 as a result of the separation of postal and telecommunications services from the Postal, Telegraph and Telephone (CTT) company inherited from the colonial era.

Corrios de Moçambqiue went from state company to public company – an entity with administrative, financial and assets management autonomy – in September, 2002.

In May 2021, the decree liquidating Correios de Moçambique was approved by the government.

Two weeks later, IGEPE met the company and laid down that the termination process should be concluded within 18 months and that a liquidation commission would be created for that purpose.

The Correios de Moçambique liquidation commission is composed of a chairman, Raimundo Jorge Matule, and two members, Adriana Pedro Rafael Miranda and Sérgio Armando Malo Matavele.

By Dario Cossa

Source: O País