Third Sanitek Employee Hit by Car in Two Weeks

Over the past two weeks, three employees of Sanitek Armenia waste management company have been injured in car accidents in various parts of Yerevan. A 27-year-old Sanitek employee underwent a leg surgery on Tuesday after being run over by a car the previous day. 41-year-old cleaner Karmen Abgaryan, who was hit by a car while on duty on March 14, is still in hospital recovering. The third Sanitek employee, 65-year-old Volodya Achemyan whom an Epress.am correspondent visited today in hospital, is set to undergo multiple surgeries on his leg after being hit by a car on March 24 on Yerevan’s Baghramyan-Kievyan intersection.

Achemyan has worked for various Yerevan waste management companies for over 22 years; his job in Sanitek involves emptying street waste containers into garbage trucks. At around 1 am on March 24, he was hit by a car while performing his duties on the Baghramyan-Kievyan intersection.

“You can just stand there and watch how the job is being done: the cars are standing in two rows, so there really isn’t a place for the Sanitek truck to park. It therefore parks in a third row, leaving the other cars with no way to pass and blocking the drivers’ view of the road,” Achemyan said, stressing that he was standing on the roadway when he was hit by a car.

“Sanitek does nothing to protect the workers’ safety. This is not the first such incident to happen in Sanitek; not a single day passes without someone getting into some kind of trouble,” he added.

Achemyan’s hospital bills are being covered by Sanitek-provided health insurance; the man, however, is still unaware whether or not he will receive compensation from the company for the period of hospitalization leave.

As with Karmen Abgaryan, Achemyan’s pay was also cut several months ago from AMD 105 000 to AMD 85 000 without prior warning or explanation; “None of the provisions were explained to us; they just presented us with the agreements and told us to sign them. That was it. Take it or leave it.”

The full conversation with Volodya Achemyan in Armenian: