BCR: The union is protesting, the management is keeping mum, the employees are working

News of a possible general strike did not reach the ears of some of the employees of the Central Headquarters of the Romanian Commercial Bank. Some of them had told us that they had not even heard about last week"s Japanese strike.

What"s more, at BCR Sebastian, some of the bank clerks said they were happy with the working conditions and their pay.

Thus, a significant number of the employees of BCR keep working, even though the disagreements between unionists and the management of the institution seem to have escalated last week. The Federation of Independent Unions (FSI) of BCR announced it has begun the conflict of interest, after the bank declined to solve the wage-related requests of the unionists.

Some of the sources in the bank were also unhappy with the protests of the unionists, according to Agerpres: "The protest of the unionists of BCR is more a protest of the union leaders, which stand to gain from it". The sources in question said: "During the protest of February 25th, we only counted 40 unionists. The union leaders were the only ones there. They claimed there were a hundred people. Furthermore, at the Japanese strike, unionists said that there were 6,000 people who participated in the Japanese strike. Can they prove there were that many? Did they collect signatures? I haven"t seen too many people wearing armbands. There were some, indeed, but not too many".

According to the quoted sources, union leaders have the most to gain from these protests, and most employees don"t even support these actions.

Some BCR employees preferred to leave comments to union leaders, whereas other opted not to comment.

• New threats of a general strike

The FSI announced that it would register the conflict of interest with the Territorial Labor Inspectorate of Bucharest and would request reconciliation, as the only mandatory stage for solving the labor conflict between the bank and its employees. "If we can"t reach an agreement after the conciliation procedure, within at most seven days, we will confer with the union members that we represent on the opportunity and the specifics of a strike", the communiqué of the FSI says.

The FSI claims that the current offer made by BCR has no connection with the current annual mandatory negotiation and was submitted last year, during the validity period of the collective labor contract.

Also, in the beginning of this year, the employees of BCR accepted two proposals of the bank, namely, the elimination for the next two years of the employer"s obligation to contribute to a private pension fund an amount of up to 200 Euros/year/employee and the modification of the severance packages for employees who were not laid off through their own fault (ed. note: individual or collective layoff).

Ciprian Ionescu, the president of the FSI, said that in the end, BCR refused to accept the proposals of its employees.

The employees of BCR have also declined the bank"s offer to raise their wages by 2% starting with April 2011 and 5% starting with 2012, since the bank had conditioned this request on the elimination of the other rights of the collective labor contract. "This was a package deal, which had a deadline by which it could be accepted, with elements that couldn"t be negotiated inside the package", according to the press release of the FSI.

The officials of BCR still decline to issue any statements on their disagreements with the unionists, at least not until the conflict of interest will be registered with the Territorial Labor Inspectorate of Bucharest.