Unions question Petrobras readjustment proposal – 03/24/2023 – Market

The FUP (United Federation of Oil Workers) criticized this Friday (24) the proposal for a 43.88% readjustment in the salaries of Petrobras’ board of directors, announced on Thursday (23) as a measure to correct salaries for the accumulated inflation of 2013 to 2022.

For the federation, which brings together 13 unions of oil workers, the measure increases the wage disparity between the top of the company and its staff, which has been without real gain since 2016. The entity also questions the approval of the proposal by councilors who are about to leave the company.

The proposal was approved by the board of directors of the state-owned company this week and will still be appreciated by the shareholders, in a meeting scheduled for April 27th. The company alleges that wages have been frozen in recent years and are lagging behind competitors.

In a note, the FUP said that “an increase of this magnitude, in addition to representing the enormous disparity in relation to any salary of employees of other public companies or mixed economy, as is the case of the oil company, also highlights the difference in treatment that the The company’s Board of Directors gives to the oil category, which, since 2016, has had no real salary gain”.

In fact, Petrobras top salaries are the highest among government-controlled state-owned companies – Eletrobras, which became a private corporation in 2022, increased its president’s salary to R$300,000 at the end of the year.

In 2022, according to data from Sest (Secretariat for the Coordination of State-owned Companies), the fixed remuneration of the president of Petrobras was R$ 116,800, not counting the 13th and additional vacations. Directors earned R$ 111.2 thousand.

If the readjustment is approved, the company’s president, Jean Paul Prates, will receive approximately R$ 168 thousand. Directors’ salaries will reach close to R$ 160,000. The values ​​consider only the fixed salary, not counting the annual performance bonuses, which have grown in recent years.

The increase also raises the salaries of board members, who earn 10% of a director’s salary. Prates and the three directors who remain in the company after the meeting abstained from voting for the readjustment.

Company directors heard by the Sheet agree with the argument that the salary of the state-owned company’s management is well below that of its private competitors, which also puts the salaries of the board behind the market.

Petrobras claims that the remuneration of the company’s president is equivalent to 19% of the median of the total annual remuneration of his equivalents in the market; that of directors is equivalent to 55%. He says that the decision considered the positive results of the company, which ended 2022 with the highest profit ever recorded by a publicly traded Brazilian company.

Petrobras claims that its workforce has had wages readjusted in recent years, they say they had a wage loss of 3.8% between 2016 and 2022 with readjustments below inflation. “In 2020 the readjustment was zero”, says the general coordinator of the entity, Deyvid Bacelar.

“As if that weren’t enough, we also took rights conquered by the category in collective bargaining agreements (ACT) over the years”, completes Bacelar, who was part of the transition group for the government’s energy area.

Company sources estimate that the unions, which today have representatives on Prates’ team, will use the readjustment to try to obtain greater salary gains and recover benefits from the company’s new management.

“This year we will have a new negotiation of ACT so that we can recover benefits and salary losses. Certainly the treatment we will have on the part of the shareholders will not be so generous”, says Bacelar, in the note distributed this Friday.