Once again, the trade unions of the workers of Chile are consulted with nothing regarding the deconfunding measures. Strange situation considering that it is us, the workers, who travel from one end of the cities to the other using public transport. With health shelters subject to our absolute discretion and pocket, risking our health, families and their lives.
Despite the insistent calls for dialogue and not being invited or heard by the authorities, the National Group of Tax Employees, ANEF, knows that the health conditions do not meet the standards required for deconfi confinement; the one that is avizojored, once again, as a misstep of government. There are no certainties of the traceability of contagion, level of testing, transparency with respect to figures, or the exact health situation.
The most threatening thing is the strategy itself, which floods common sense with doubts in considering that the virus is only contagious at night, weekends and holidays. And in the week when we have to open crowded utilities, factories, malls and shops, does the virus turn out to be good people at those times? In painful words, it is worth saying: the dead have to be put by us, those who make the country work.
As the inhabitants of regions, instead of designing their own territorial strategies together with their authorities, they must adapt those emanating from the centralized and classist gaze of the Ministry of Health, which has demonstrated to design the health strategy with high-thousand-high realities. Meanwhile in some territories the contagion figures are growing, the regional population adapts the decisions and measures to be taken in Santiago.
The Ministry of Health tells us that deconfunding is very beneficial and will allow us to walk through the parks with physical estrangement; WHO establishes healthy 9m2 of green area per capita. High Bridge has 1.5, Forest 1.9, Cerro Navia 2.1, Vitacura, 7.1. Who, with all the social and health security measures, will be able to walk through the parks or squares? The Government’s Step-by-Step has no worker’s or public official shoes, nor do users of the State.
The Government’s Step by Step is a partial and abrupt deconfination. Full of ambiguities and doubts that remind us of the failed strategy of dynamic quarantines that positioned us as the country with the worst management of the health crisis. Once again the Government puts the focus on production and the market, taking advantage of people’s urgent need for work to feed themselves.
It’s not time to improvise anymore. The Government needs to reassess its attitude and understand that, if we do it all, strategies will be life-focused. By dialogue with the workers’ trade unions, you will learn the opinion of those who are now doomed to the disease by giving a “step by step” to a re-up. The ANEF will defend its workers from contagion, there are no adequate sanitary conditions or infrastructure to ensure physical estrangement between our civil servants. Nor does standardized and centralized measures of health protocols, leaving everything to the discretion, criterion or decriteriom of the heads of services. Nor do they ensure the lives of users, citizens who are desperate for state aid.
Not one more step without the workers. The voice and lives of civil servants are urgent.
The content poured into this opinion column is the sole responsibility of its author, and does not necessarily reflect the editorial line or position of El Mostrador.
