The workers of the Santa Rita Home Yesterday they demanded the resignation of the Foundation’s manager, Tomás Villar, whom they accused of being the main person responsible for the delay in the payment of salaries, a situation that has been repeated for more than a year and that generates enormous damage to the 450 center employees.
This February they received the January payroll on the 17th and they have no guarantee that the next ones will be able to do it in a timely manner. For this reason, they gathered yesterday at the gates of the institution and will continue to do so on the 6th of each month if the delays continue.
Unlike the first protest, held in September of last year, yesterday double the number of employees could be seen, almost a hundred, who with banners warned: “If this is not fixed, strike, strike, strike.” They also alluded directly to Villar: “Our manager is incompetent.”
The person in charge of the socio-sanitary and health sector of Workers CommissionsAlexis Rodríguez, insisted that the workers’ representatives have requested to be part of the Board of Trustees, as has the Cabildo de Tenerife, which, through the Institute of Social and Socio-Health Care (IASS), has 374 concerted positions, and denied that doing so be “an illegality”, as the manager pointed out in an assembly.
“The objective of entering is to have the guarantees of the payment and of what is managed, above all, the concerted places, which represent almost six million euros a year,” he said. The explanation for the delay in payroll is always the same on the part of management: the lack of liquidity and the delay on the part of the IASS.
The union representative recalled that the Santa Rita Foundation is not for profit and, therefore, “does not understand” that those responsible “do not have clear accounts.”
“They are subsistence salaries, which barely reach a thousand euros, and no one is capable of empathizing with this situation,” Rodríguez declared. An affirmation with which the advisor of Intersindical Canaria (IC), Fran Baute, agreed, who stressed that, despite the fact that they are paid at the wrong time, the staff “has always complied, performing their duties with absolute professionalism”.
Convening power
Baute underlined the power of convocation yesterday. “Although the fear continues, in the last assembly last week there was a turning point with more people who participated because they realized that not only had they not been paid but they had been treated with absolute insensitivity and without any explanation. about it,” he said. “But there is one thing that overcomes fear and that is the need to survive. In this sense, Villar has abused and drowned the economy of many families, ”he said.
“It is clear that there is a castling on the part of the management. This obscurantism shows that there is something strange and we are convinced that Villar is the problem, along with the accomplices of the Board of Trustees. That is why we consider that the relay is necessary when the rest of us walk in the same direction, ”he said.
More dialogue and a schedule of performances for the future
Alexis Rodríguez considered that both the Cabildo de Tenerife and the Government of the Canary Islands “should be able to sit down the four actors in this conflict to give them the light that the manager and the Board of Trustees refuse.”
The three unions with representation in the works council (CCOO, IC and UGT) of the Hogar Santa Rita already have a scheduled and agreed schedule of actions that they will announce on Friday, for which they will have the relatives of the residents and other founding members of the center, “who are concerned about being in the social limelight all the time and that the work of Father Antonio deteriorates.”
