Babcock is the main concessionaire of emergency air services in Spain with 160 aircraft and in Alicante alone it has about 650 employees The workers denounce that the company has been in breach of the collective agreement for more than seven years, expired since 2018 They will begin with mobilizations and a strike if the company does not responds to their demands to work in decent working conditions and unfreeze their salaries The workers of the Alicante company Babckock MCS Fleets, the main concessionaire for emergency air services in Spain, have announced that they will go on strike if the company does not comply and offers some decent working conditions for its nearly 650 employees, including administrative and technical staff. The Works Committee denounces the constant breach of the agreement signed in 2015, by the company, violating their rights as workers and maintaining salary tables that have been “practically frozen for more than seven years”, they point out in a statement. Some attitudes that, according to the Committee, “have been the norm in the management of the company and HR management” and that have led them to even have to resort to legal proceedings to defend their rights as workers. In this sense, they warn of the non-compliance with a sentence of the National High Court regarding the decent accommodation of the workers assigned to the campaign, as well as that the company has tried to violate the right to legal representation of the workers. This after what “appeared to be a change in the company’s position towards the workers, last spring”, when the social part resumed negotiations with the hope of not having to go on strike, since, with an increase in prices without precedent, these measures should be the last option”, they assert. “Unbearable for workers” Now, the Babcock emergency helicopter concessionaire is in the process of being sold to the Ancala Partners investment fund, and will be renamed AVINCIS in the future. The workers’ representative and member of the Spanish Trade Union Association of Aeronautical Maintenance Technicians (Asetma), David Vicente, regrets that the company hides behind this sale process to avoid the renegotiation of the collective agreement with the Committee, an issue that they have been claiming for years. For this reason, the mobilizations are going to begin ” to make known to society, clients, and current and future owners (ANCALA PARTNERS), the situation in which they find themselves” and in order to make management aware of the importance of decent working conditions, even reaching the strike if necessary. A situation that has become completely “unbearable” for the workers “in a scenario of an accumulated CPI of more than 19% in this per iodo”, they affirm in relation to the seven years that the collective agreement has expired. “Growing in maintenance to third parties” In addition, in its statement, the Workers’ Committee recalls that “this company has gone through one of the biggest crises in aeronautics, such as the covid, with little impact on its activity and billing to customers , since the rescue, sanitary and fire-fighting operation, the main areas of work, have been maintained”. And, they add, “it is even currently growing in third-party maintenance, but due to its treatment and contempt for workers, its workforce is shrinking.” Babcock currently operates 160 aircraft that provide medical emergency services and civil protection; maritime Rescue; and fire prevention and extinction, among others. In addition, their own fleet and those of third parties carry out aircraft maintenance, and they have the capacity to maintain 31 aircraft simultaneously, thanks to more than 120 bases located throughout Spain and 1,300 employees.