By Chesney Hearst, Senior Contributing Reporter
RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – After over four hours of negotiations held at the Tribunal Regional do Trabalho (Regional Labor Court) on the afternoon of Saturday, March 8th, the street sweepers from Comlurb (Municipal Urban Cleaning Company) and the city reached an agreement ending the strike that began on Saturday, March 1st and saw trash overflowing in city during Carnival celebrations.
Base salaries for the street sweepers will now increase from R$803 to R$1,100 and daily meals allowances will rise to R$20. The settlement fell slightly short of the initial demands of R$1,200 but was still seen as a major victory.
“It is a milestone. Nobody thought there would be an increase of that size today in Rio,” one worker told O Globo. The negotiations were previously scheduled for Tuesday, March 11th, but were moved up to Saturday afternoon.
Street sweeping services were said to resume immediately and the collection of the accumulated trash should take two to three days. “In three days, the street sweepers will clean up the city . We assure the locals that the waters of March will not turn the river into a sea of garbage,” Wiliam Rocha de Oliveira of Comlurb told O Globo.
Read more (in Portuguese).
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