Beginning tomorrow 158 employees of the Armenian Nuclear Power Plant (NPP) in Metsamor plan to stop working, because their demands to increase their salaries, made a month ago, have not been met.
The participants of the strike make one third of the plant’s employees, who are engineering and technical staff members of four main NPP workshops, and experts fear that it will be impossible to run the plant without them.
“Today, the management has been persuading us to return for about an hour, but it is impossible. They do not want to make a compromise, and we do not want to work putting our lives at stake and work, being paid insufficiently. They know very well that they will not manage to find specialists with similar qualifications within a day or even a year, and they cannot train specialists either, but at the same time, they do not want to meet our requests,” an employee from the plant’s operating headquarters told ArmeniaNow, asking not to publish his name.
Since March this year, the plant’s employees asked for a pay raise, however, they were denied, and in September they submitted applications to President Serzh Sargsyan, Energy and Natural Resources Minister Armen Movsisyan, and the management of the plant, demanding to raise their salaries by about 50 percent, taking into account inflation over the recent two years in Armenia, as well as the specialization of their profession.
However, the demand was not satisfied. Director of the Metsamor NPP Gagik Markosyan refused to give ArmeniaNow an interview, saying only that “their (striking employees’) wages are quite high, and it is impossible to raise them more.”
Continue reading at Going on Strike: Nuclear Power Plant employees say their professionalism is not appreciated
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