Buenos Aires, Feb 17 (NA) – The Naval Drivers' Union (SICONARA) announced this Tuesday that from 00:00 hours on Wednesday, and for a period of 48 hours, it will carry out a national strike that will affect all branches of the activity such as merchant marine, tugs and fishing against the labor reform promoted by the Government. The measure was adopted in response to the initiative that “seeks to exclude embarked personnel from the Labor Contract Law, leaving them outside basic labor protection and placing them under the Commercial Code, which is a negligence that we demand be excluded now in the Chamber of Deputies after its approval in the Senate,” said the union's general secretary, Mariano Vilar, who added that the sector will mobilize to Congress on Thursday. The strike action will be carried out jointly with the Maritime and River Federation (Fesimaf), from where they stated that this reform, if approved as written, “constitutes a labor adjustment that attacks elementary protective principles, deteriorates the conditions of maritime transport and will generate direct operational impacts on the country's logistics and foreign trade.” Vilar emphasized that the “Naval Drivers are Argentine workers in Argentina, on land or at sea, and we must be governed by the same rights as the rest. They seek to exclude us even from the scope of Labor Justice, placing us under the Commercial Code as if we were not workers, including us in other regimes, such as those deprived of their liberty.” In this sense, he warned that the 48-hour strike “is part of the continuity of the struggle plan” and that our organization does not rule out deepening the measures, including indefinitely, in the event of not obtaining responses. Fesimaf sectors. The activities that will join the 48-hour strike are pusher tugs for dry and/or liquid cargo; tankers, container ships and cargo ships; vessels in offshore tasks and port maneuver tugboats. Also Buenos Aires and Litoral sand dredgers; mooring and pilot boats; collective, tourism, loggers and collection launches, and fishing vessels, as the Argentine News Agency learned from union sources.
