juntos en accion - together in action - agir ensemble

Merche del Campo Rodriguez, 28 years, Santander, Spain
Work: Educator
Conditions at work: I studied social integration and now I am in third year of my social education studies. At the same time, I am doing social integration work at the home assistance service for the Servirecord company, a sub-contractor of the local authorities.

Although I am actually tasked with social integration, my contract and my salary correspond to home assistance work because the collective agreement relating to work in elderly homes and to home assistance has not foreseen my task. I am one of the two people in this situation because it is a new service provided by the local authorities. When we signed the contract, we were told that although our professional profile was not included in the agreement, we would not be paid as home aides but we would receive an additional 15% as our responsibilities were not the same as the aides’. But this isn’t happening in the practice. Not only do they not pay us the additional 15% but in addition to that, our conditions are worse than the aides’ because in their case, their travel time from one home to another is included in their working hours while it is not in our case. They also promised us full-time work and although we were to start with the cases already foreseen, we were supposed to have more later on in order to have full-time work. This isn’t happening either. We do not have a full-time job because the schedules make it impossible and our travel time is not included in the working hours. In addition, once some cases are closed, we are not given new ones; our number of hours is reduced every time, and of course so does our salary.

The union representatives do not know very well how to respond to our problem. They told us that the only thing they could do was to try and obtain for us the same conditions as the home aides but they said it was difficult to get more because our task was not included in the agreement. This is not a surprise as the Cantabria employment service does not recognize it either.

Although this is not an isolated experience (I worked in other companies or organizations in the social sector and the conditions were not much better), on two occasions I worked for Cantabrian local authorities and I had a contract there. When I worked in the child activity sector (I organized birthday parties, camps or extra-curricula activities), we didn’t have a contract for all the hours we worked but only for a few.

My dream for young workers is that we can have a stable job, no more than 35 hours, and a decent salary (that allows us to be independent, to have leisure activities…). My dream is to have the opportunity to have access to housing without having to pay a mortgage for forty or fifty years, or without paying an excessive rent for a 30 square meter place.

My dream is also that all young people participate more and that we are not manipulated by politicians and employers…

Because it would improve the living conditions of young people and would allow us to work for a living and not to live to work.