Abtran IWU members took their first highly successful industrial action the week just gone. On Monday, Wednesday and Friday, communications were sent out to coworkers all over the company about the demand for 15 euro an hour, a more generous Christmas bonus, a clearly laid out service pay and a cessation of disciplinary processes against those covered under the Sick Leave Act.

On the 1st and 2nd of August emails were issued promising to examine pay and conditions within the company. To date, nothing within the company has changed and no improvements to pay or conditions made.

On Friday 23rd we learned Abtran has a new program launched following a recent Pulse Survey conducted within the company. The program suggested that a number of staff teams will be organised to lodge ideas on how to improve conditions in the workplace. We encourage Abtran to be completely transparent with how this will be conducted and how staff will be chosen. We encourage Abtran to use the pay claim as the benchmark of what workers want to see improved in the company.

At the same time, it has come to our attention that a number of staff were removed from various group chats that offered extra curricular activies within the company (such as cooking, music, sports etc…) and no clear reason has been given to the staff that were affected while they were engaging with industrial action. The company also pulled many of our members into “informal” meetings about breach of company policy and issued letters stating they may consider taking further disciplinary action.

We can only interpret this one way.

Our campaign for our pay claim has to continue and it is only the strength of our unity and our unity as members of the union that will determine what we win.

We call on all Abtran workers to unionise and have each other’s backs.

We are mothers, we are carers, we are students, we are fathers, we are young and we are old, we are new in the job and we have been there almost 2 decades.

We are ordinary people with ordinary lives, without whose work, Abtran would not make a cent of profit. We deserve more.