The National Union of Civil Aviation Workers (SINTAC) announced that SATA’s ground workers will be on strike from July 24 against “discriminatory treatment” by the Azorean airline.
In a statement published on the union’s website, SINTAC considers it “unacceptable” that the wage review is not “equitably” distributed to all workers.
“SINTAC cannot accept that the SATA Group’s ground workers, regardless of their union affiliation, should be treated in a discriminatory way compared to others in the group,” reads the press release.
The union says it does not endorse or agree with “the application to SINTAC members of an agreement made with another union”, because “it is unfair when compared to others”.
SINTAC also points to the “precarious conditions” in which many workers work, with “systematic recourse to overtime” that “exhausts human resources physically and psychologically” and causes a “feeling of injustice.”
The union also denounces “the company’s lack of response to the need to review careers”.
It adds that all of this results in “social instability in the SATA Group,” which “worries SINTAC greatly.”
“SATA workers live between the mercenarism of a few who are not moved by the destruction they cause and have caused to the company and the eternal messianism that someone is going to come and save SATA,” it says.
For the union, “SATA doesn’t need to be saved, it needs to be managed well, by competent people who respect the social mission for which it was created, to serve the Azores and the Azoreans”.
According to the SINTAC statement, the strike on overtime work in the SATA group, scheduled by SINTAC, will begin at midnight on July 24 and end on December 31, 2024.
The union says that the workers “are mobilized” for the strike, claiming that it is “the only way” to make themselves heard in the face of “the company’s inability to understand the seriousness of its actions.”

in Diário dos Açores-Osvaldo Cabral, director

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