Employee says he is persecuted for opposing the privatization of Eletrobras

Electrical engineer Ikaro Chaves, former union leader and former elected board member of the Board of Directors (Consad) of Eletronorte, a subsidiary of Eletrobras, responds to a dismissal process for just cause for his positions critical of the privatization of the company, which took place in 2022, during the government of former President Jair Bolsonaro. Last Friday (14), according to the Union of Urban Workers of the Federal District (Stiu-DF), Chaves was surprised by the opening of the procedure, which granted five working days to present the defense, therefore, next Friday (21). Ikaro Chaves denounces persecution – Personal archive “It is unbelievable to what extent Eletrobras has reached. They dismiss highly qualified professionals, fathers and mothers of families, with excellent services provided to the companies of the Eletrobras Group, they threaten union leaders in the state of Rio de Janeiro with dismissals, for making a public act, for the renationalization at the headquarters of Eletrobras, they cowardly coerced workers in the last live coordinated by the VP [vice-presidente] of People, to increase adherence to the POS [Plano de Demissão Voluntária] ‘compulsory’, and to top it off, opens a dismissal process, for just cause, against a highly qualified professional who fully complies with his obligations to the company, solely for fighting for the renationalization of Eletrobras”, says the public note from Stiu-DF that denounces the persecution. dos Deputies, on May 17 of this year, in which he would have made accusations to the company’s president about the company’s financial information, in addition to an alleged relationship between the reduction of employees and the operational safety of the electrical system. To Agência Brasil, Chaves says that the company has intensified the persecution against worker leaders who are still mobilized to try to reverse the privatization process and denounce what he calls the dismantling of the company. “This process that we are living now, since privatization, is one of coercion and generalized persecution, to force workers to adhere to a Voluntary Dismissal Plan (PDV),” he says. “In addition to the natural dismissal process that the company has been doing, they [gestores] They want to destroy the existing culture. In our case, there is also a component of revenge. The same leading civil servants who carried out the privatization process remain in the company and consider that the workers were one of the main obstacles to privatization. You can’t fire people based on opinion”, he adds. According to Ikaro Chaves, the Eletrobras Group’s goal is to fire around 1,500 employees, which represents approximately 20% of the approximately 8,000. The number of company employees reached 26,000 in the recent past, before the company was downsized to be privatized. of company employees in service”, informs. Support Last Monday (17), union leaders and Eletronorte employees organized an act of reparation to Ikaro Chaves, at the company’s headquarters, in Brasília. We live in a democracy where freedom of expression and opinion must be preserved. Eletrobras’ attempt to restrict people’s freedom to express themselves is one of the characteristics of the dark times of the dictatorship, which the Brazilian people no longer accept”, accuses Stiu-DF, in a public note. bras, even after privatization, tries to review some rules that drastically reduced the Union’s voting power in the company’s direction. In May, the Attorney General’s Office (AGU) filed a lawsuit with the Federal Supreme Court (STF) to question the constitutionality of some provisions of Law 14,182/2021, such as the section that deals with the reduction of the Union’s participation in the votes of the company’s board. % of the number of shares. The document is signed by President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and by the Attorney General of the Union, Jorge Messias. In the petition, they point out that the objective of the is not to renationalize Eletrobras, but to protect the public interest and the property rights of the Union. The company is considered very strategic for the country’s energy security, as it owns one-third of the installed electricity generating capacity in the country. The company also owns almost half of the total transmission lines. Article with amendment, at 4 pm, in the first paragraph: privatization was in 2022 and not 2021, as initially informed

Agência Brasil