To gamble their lives for about 1,300 € per month. These are the conditions in which the Forest Firefighters of the Community of Madrid have been working for years, which have ended up crystallizing in the strike that started last July 15 and will last a month: until next August 15.
The salaries, according to what the workers have exposed in several publications in their social networks, are “miserable” and “in some categories they are close to the SMI [Minimum Interprofessional Wage]”: here you can see an example of a payroll in which they barely exceed 1,250 €.
Their salaries, they denounce, have hardly changed since 2009 and their agreement has not been renewed for 17 years. However, this is only one of the reasons that has led them to call the strike.
What other reasons have led the Forest Firefighters to strike?
In addition to demanding that both the company TRAGSA and the Community of Madrid negotiate a decent agreement (which has not been renewed since 2008), the Madrid Forest Firefighters are focusing on other aspects of their working conditions.
Among them is the temporality, which “chronifies the precariousness and endangers the safety of workers and Madrilenians” -more than 40% of the workforce has no permanent job-. In addition, there are other factors such as:
- The lack of conciliation.
- The absence of a risk assessment adapted to their profession.
- The lack of bonuses for hardship, dangerousness, toxicity… and recognized occupational diseases.
- The application of the law 5/2024, of November 8, which recognizes a basic statute for Forest Firefighters.
- Small and poorly maintained bases that do not protect them from the carcinogenic agents to which they are exposed by their work (both in winter and summer).
The response of the Community of Madrid
A couple of days ago, during the presentation of Milla Canal, the president of the Community of Madrid, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, referred to the workers’ protest as “a senseless strike”.
In her speech to the media, Ayuso declared that “in the worst moment of the summer, in the most difficult moments […] all the troops have to be saving lives, protecting them, and these issues should be cut at once, because if you want to, you can reach a negotiation”.
The firefighters say they have been trying to meet with the administration since February. Last April they already started the protests, both at the TRAGSA Group headquarters and at the Department of the Environment: in both actions, they point out, they had the support of 90% of the staff.
Minimum services of 80%.
As the President of the Community of Madrid herself said in her statements, the Madrid Forest Firefighters not only work on fires in the region, but also in neighboring territories. And so it continues to be during the operation of the minimum services, which are 80%.
A recent example of this, just two days after the strike began, was their intervention in the fire in Méntrida (Toledo), visible from the capital in the form of smoke and ash. The fire took place during what is considered a period of high danger (from June 15 to September 30) in the Special Emergency Civil Protection Plan for Forest Fires in the Community of Madrid (INFOMA) -which remains active all year round-.
Aware of this, the firefighters have pointed out in statements to El Salto that the strike is not a threat, but “a direct consequence of institutional contempt and labor misery”.