Uruguayan Navy docks: Thousands of overtime hours charged and not worked by civilian personnel

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Civilian workers dependent on the Construction, Repair, and Armament Service of the Uruguayan Navy, mostly hired since the government of José Mujica onwards, when it was intended to unify all the establishments of the state naval industry and form a new public company directed by a related official, have been irregularly paid for “fictitious” overtime, which to date means tens of thousands of dollars.

Despite the very low volume of work and the technological deficiencies in the two Navy shipyards, which years ago were refurbished with very serious irregularities, bypassing any parliamentary control or the Court of Auditors and without acquiring part of the minimum necessary equipment (which was evidenced during the cumbersome and unfinished process of partial modernization of the flagship ROU 04 Artigas), the last naval administrations -including the current one- decided to compensate the conglomerate of almost 200 workers, mostly related to the metallurgical unionism, with so-called “fictitious” overtime.

In reality, it would be difficult for the unionized personnel to work the working week to effectively work the voluminous overtime hours declared and programmed as “fictitious” in full awareness of the total probability of not actually being worked, which was warned days ago by the new Director of Material (who had already denounced the issue of improper overpayments to military personnel) immediately canceling this disbursement.

Because of this, the union, also affiliated with the radical Confederation of Civil Servants of the State and the Marxist trade union center PIT-CNT, is calling today for an urgent extraordinary assembly, with a high possibility of becoming the prelude to an arduous conflict in the maritime sector, despite the irregularity of its situation, which borders on the criminal field, as well as triggering a broad retrospective and current investigation, once again compromising the highest hierarchies of the Navy, having opted to maintain the status quo rather than face the present situation, despite the deep losses generated and the fraud constituted.

This new scandal is added to the current denunciations for the payment of extra salaries to naval military personnel to whom this benefit, by law and for not belonging to the cadres specifically distinguished with the payments, does not correspond to them on which all the Uruguayan press was based to inform the public of the country, which are being investigated administratively and probably at the judicial level, since they were rewarded to troops not covered by the regulations for years, increasing their salary by a third.

With information from Edefa