On 6 July 2015, unionised workers at Cencosud S.A. (Centros Comerciales Sudamericanos) denounced that the multinational retail company had fired over 6,000 workers, seriously weakening the trade union organisations. The dismissals began on 26 June 2015 and went on for several days, affecting employees at the company’s retail outlets across the country. Around 1,000 employees lost their jobs at the company’s Paris department stores and another 5,000 were laid off at various other retail outlets and businesses owned by Cencosud.
According to the information received from the company, the dismissals were supposedly related to the “uncertainty” faced by businesses as a result of government reforms. For the trade union, the wave of dismissals is part of a policy of terror aimed at dismantling workers’ organisations, as well as seeking to hinder any potential change in the pro-business labour legislation that has been in force in the country since the dictatorship and to press the Nueva Mayoría (New Majority) coalition to make no more than minor adjustments, without altering the substance of the anti-worker Labour Code.
The union reports that it is not the first time there has been mass dismissals at the company. In June 2014, large numbers of workers were dismissed, several thousand according to the company itself, on the pretext of the need to “rationalise” and optimise resources.
Companies like Cencosud have, over their history, been denounced and fined for subdividing their businesses into different legal entities (‘multirut’), making it difficult to organise workers, as each entity requires a separate union. According to the research of the Fundación Sol, this occult form of subcontracting is aimed at weakening workers’ power, pushing up profits and stepping up exploitation.
In 2012, Jumbo workers denounced the constant anti-union practices they were faced with, as did workers affiliated to the Sindicato de Trabajadores de Logística Cencosud, which represents employees at the Jumbo, Santa Isabel, Economax and Montecarlo supermarkets, in 2009. Two of the companies in the group were fined on these grounds in 2015.