Taxi drivers in Santa Pola turn the virus and crisis around with solidarity
The association of Taxi Santa Pola “Polataxi” joins the spirit of this initiative.
With their work in the garage, the taxi drivers are having a very bad time. Its sector is one of the hardest hit by the crisis. No matter who you speak to, from Betanzos to Teo, from Ribeira to A Laracha, from Pontedeume to Fene, the profession is going through the worst moments it could ever imagine. There are no customers to bring. There is no money to take home. Different associations in the province, which estimate the business drop at 90%, have had to make decisions. How to sign agreements with the Xunta, with the town councils. Or that the even licenses work one day and the odd ones another.
Despite all the hardships, they won’t stop doing it. «We are necessary. Like the police, supermarket workers or doctors. We have to be there because there are many people who need us, “says Alfonso Castro, a driver from Ferrol who explains the” extremely harsh “situation they are experiencing. “Both those who own the license and those of us who are employees. They no longer know where to get to pay us and we no longer know if we will get paid next month.
With empty pockets, but with a full soul, the vast majority of taxi drivers dedicate what used to be careers to help. To take the purchase to people who cannot leave home, to transfer toilets or even medical documents from one center to another, as is happening in A Coruña, where Sergas reached an agreement with the two taxi associations to make them this important work.
Not even three weeks ago, a woman contacted La Voz so that “everyone knows the human quality of a taxi driver” who found her one rainy day at a bus stop: “She stopped the car and told me that He would take me home or wherever, that he had finished his day and that he would not charge me anything ». She left it at her home and “flatly refused to accept a euro from me.”
Aid for the self-employed
Stories like this are lived throughout the province. As if the financial situation did not disturb their spirits and the desire to serve. Luis Zambrano is a taxi driver in Santiago and explains the employment situation in the sector: «As it is made up of a majority of self-employed workers who pay taxes on the module system, there is still no clear solution in the package of measures to support the self-employed announced by the Government ».
A benefit to which any self-employed worker who is affected by the closure of businesses after the decree of the state of alarm can take advantage of, or whose income falls this month by 75% with respect to the monthly average of the previous semester. For businesses or hospitality establishments, forced to interrupt the dry service without further options, it is enough to claim business closure without justifying the drop in income. In the taxi sector «the story is complicated since, although it has not ceased its activity, it has experienced an almost total fall in income that has precipitated a considerable amount of ERTE from among license holders with workers under their care », Says Luis. A decline that is difficult to justify as they are not required to issue invoices.
All this must be added to the drivers who have decided to park the taxi due to previous health problems that place them in the risk group, which led them to think twice about whether it was worth exposing themselves to the virus.
Councils like that of Culleredo have also taken action. These include limiting the number of passengers to 50% of the vehicle’s capacity, reporting prevention obligations, reinforcing cleaning and disinfection routines, opening the windows to renew the air inside the car, or facilitating electronic payment. .
Deal with bills
Ramiro Vázquez is a taxi driver in Carballo. This week he was at his stop, with no customers, and it takes a long time. “We taxi drivers do not bill anything, a xente does not move,” he complains. He believes that the situation is very complicated, and it will be more so: «You have to pay mortgages, loans, students studying, you are self-employed … It continues like this, nothing can be paid, and the banks will not lose debts. Not until the end of the world, but get married ”, he says.
The Ribeira taxi drivers association, for its part, agreed to halve the workforce that attends the stop installed in the central Rúa Otero Pedrayo for the entire month of April. The adopted decision contemplates that the taxi shifts will begin to be carried out from seven in the morning, the odd days corresponding to the licenses between the number 1 and 21 and the even days to which they are numbered between the 25 and 46. It should be remembered in relation to COVID-19 that the taxi driver group received on March 20 a reprimand from the head of the Local Police for complaints from third parties, due to their agglomeration of colleagues at the stop, and warned them of possible sanctions.
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