Oil Workers in Brazil Announce Strike Starting Friday

By Jay Forte, Contributing Reporter

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – The Federação Única dos Petroleiros (FUP), or Single Federation of Oil Workers, has filed a statement of indefinite strike yesterday (September 2nd) at the headquarters of Petrobras in Rio de Janeiro. The strike is to start Friday (September 4th) and will cover all administrative and operating units of the company.

According to the FUP, the strike is against the new Plano de Negócios e Gestão da Petrobras 2015-2019 (Petrobras Business Plan and Management), which allows for the sale of US$57.7 billion in assets, and US$76 billion in investments and spending cuts.

The FUP declared, “The new oil workers strike will take place in protest to the new Plano de Negócios e Gestão, which represents a real dismantling of the company, whose impacts are already taking place in various units of the country, with thousands of layoffs of contract workers and cuts in spending.”

Adding, “To reverse these attacks, workers who do not escape the fighting and have grown accustomed to face this kind of battle, respond with strike.”

The strike also affects the facilities of Transpetro, the company responsible for natural gas processing, besides working in import-export operations of oil and oil products, gas and ethanol.

Petrobras said in a statement that it has scheduled a meeting with union representatives for this Thursday (September 3rd) to handle the process of negotiation of the collective agreement in 2015.

Petrobras closed the second quarter of 2015 with a net income of R$531 million, an 89.3 percent decline from the R$4.95 billion registered during the same quarter last year. During the first quarter of 2015 the oil giant had registered a net profit of R$5.33 billion. For the first six months of the year, the net income totaled R$5.86 billion, down by 43 percent from the same period in 2014.