Epress.am News from Armenia
Seven employees of the Sanitek Armenia waste management company have been in various types of accidents while on duty since the beginning of 2017, Sanitek’s press service said in response to an Epress.am inquiry, making it clear that Sanitek does not believe any of the accidents have occurred due to the company’s fault.
“The reasons for all of these cases are completely different: in some cases there was inattention or omission on the part of the employee; in another case, the [accident occurred] to the fault of a third party,” the answer claims, pointing out that since the work in the field of waste management is not easy, problems and minor incidents are unavoidable.
The stories told to Epress.am by the affected employees, however, paint a quite different picture of the events than that given by Sanitek.
41-year-old Karmen Abgaryan, who was hit by a car as she tried to cross the street to carry out her duties, for instance, claims that Sanitek employees are always forced to work overtime. On the day of the accident, according to the woman, she was made to stay and clean the roadway on Yerevan’s Heratsi street after her shift had ended because mayor Taron Margaryan’s motorcade was expected to drive by the area.
“We got off the minibus and had to cross the street. The traffic had already begun, but we could not use the above-ground passway because we had to be exactly at the center of the street. I was hit by a car when crossing the street, and if it weren’t for the other cleaner, who managed to grab my arm and pull me back, the consequences would be much graver for me,” Abgaryan said.
Volodya Achemyan, a 65-year-old member of a Sanitek garbage pickup crew, was hit by a car on Yerevan’s Baghramyan-Kievyan intersection in late March. “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 told Epress.am, stressing that he was standing on the roadway when he was hit by a car.Epress.am inquired of Sanitek whether the company tends to take measures to ensure a safe working environment for its employees.
“The company periodically carries out explanatory work with all its employees to ensure that safety rules are obeyed,” Sanitek’s answer says, insisting that in all cases of security breaches the company takes appropriate measures, and sometimes even imposes disciplinary actions.
Both Abgaryan and Achemyan, meanwhile, claim that the company rarely takes measures to create safe working conditions for the employees.
“They told us to just go and do our job. When the company had only opened, we were told that we would not have to go further than 75 centimetres into the roadway, but now we are forced to go 3-4 meters,” Abgaryan says.
Volodya Achemyan, for his part, points out: “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.”
Sanitek comments on the incident with Achemyan in the following way: “Without going into too much detail, we just want to note that this is a classic example of an accident, from which no one is protected. The accident involving Volodya Achemyan occurred during his working hours, but it was not caused by a breach of safety rules. A citizen hit our employee with a car while he was standing near a Sanitek truck.”
Volodya Achemyan’s daughter, Ruzanna, insists that since the accident, they have received no help from Sanitek, except for the medical insurance envisaged by the labor contract.
“Father needed blood transfusion, but we were short of money. So I called Sanitek and asked for 30 000 drams, but they said they could not help me. They haven’t even checked up on him to make sure he is alive; he is their employee after all,” Ruzanna said.
The woman also told us that Sanitek has been refusing to re-hire her as a cleaner, insisting that the woman has been “blacklisted” by the company. Last summer, Ruzanna, along with several other Sanitek employees, took on a second job as cleaners at a Yerevan market. Immediately upon finding out, the Sanitek management made the women hand in their resignation letter.
“We had only been working at the market for a week when Sanitek officials came for us… They were filming the entire process, as if we were some kind of criminals. It’s not like they were paying me 500 dollars – I couldn’t afford not working anywhere else. They took us to a room and locked us there; then one of their officials came and began talking to us rudely… In a word, they fired us and refused to pay for the last 15 days. They told us we would be able to work [in Sanitek] again in two months, so we signed the resignation letters,” Ruzanna noted.
“There was a clear reason for this: a group of employees, including Volodya Achemyan’s daughter, went to the city of Masis and carried out a range of cleaning activities during their Sanitek working hours, weraing the Sanitek unifor and using Sanitek tools. After learning about this, Sanitek, which pays its employees for the proper performance of their duties, dismissed all those who had shown such an approach, having every reason to do so.
“As for the company’s employees taking on a second job, Sanitek has no right to oppose or prohibit its employees from working in other structures. Moreover, there are many employees who parallelly work several places. The blacklist you have mentioned is comprised not of the employees who have a second job, but of those who tried to deceive the company, harming both the working process and the company’s reputation,” Sanitek’s response to Epress.am says.
Ruzanna Achemyan, however, denies the above-mentioned. The photos that Sanitek representatives took when they came for them to their second workplace, she adds, can also prove that the employees were not wearing Sanitek uniforms either.