According to the statement, people who do not receive certain components of their remuneration on time are entitled to them and will be paid as soon as possible together with the interest due. Several hundred people have been affected by this decision.
“The Board of Directors of PKP CARGO SA and the Manager deeply regret the situation and declare that they will take all possible measures to ensure that the inconveniences related to the above are as minimal as possible”, reads the company’s statement.
Trade Unionist: We thought it would be worse
We are speaking with Leszek Miętek, president of the Polish Railway Drivers’ Union.
Weronika Szkwarek: Several hundred employees will have lower salaries due to the lack of payment of some benefits. Won’t this result in further problems with salary payments?
Little Red Riding Hood: To be honest, it’s better now than I initially thought. There was information that the July remuneration would come from the Guaranteed Social Benefits Fund, but it turned out that the company obtained these funds on its own.
We are still waiting for a recovery program to be presented to us, because labor restructuring cannot be the only element of recovery – it must be combined with a program of changing the company’s structure and the processes that take place in the transport company. We are looking forward to the meeting that will take place on August 21.
He said that reducing employment cannot be the only point of the recovery plan. So what else should be included in it?
Once the restructuring is announced, the company’s recovery plan must be submitted to the court within a month. As far as I know, the teams are working on it – we don’t know anything about the details of this plan yet.
However, we believe that restructuring of employment is necessary. The company has a poor structure – mainly, it has many non-operational employees. And we are talking about a competitive market where these structures are very different from those of PKP Cargo and with such costs the company has no chance to compete in the market. But as I said, changes are necessary, but they need to be correlated with changes in structure.
Will compensation for coal decision save jobs?
I think it will certainly help the company with current financing and maintaining the company’s financial liquidity and settling the receivables that the company must pay continuously during the restructuring.
We need a change in the state’s transport policy. A policy that will aim to stop this lack of competitiveness, because we continue to stress that the railways had a 30 percent share of the freight transport market. Today it is less than 10 percent.
