On The First Day Of The Resumption Of Activities At Petrobras’s P-77 Unit, New Suspension Is Imposed On The Boarding And Disembarking Of Workers

The Suspension Occurred at Unit P-77, Located in the Búzios Field, So That All Workers Could Be Tested for Covid-19

Today, July 27, would be the first day of the implementation of Phase 1 of the return to in-person work for operations on Petrobras platforms. However, at Unit P-77, there was a new suspension of worker embarkations and disembarkations due to covid-19, so that all workers at the unit could be tested.

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Petrobras confirmed the cases at the unit but did not disclose the number of infected individuals and stated that production has not been interrupted. According to the company, “as determined by the preventive procedure used at Petrobras, any employee who reports symptoms compatible with covid-19 is immediately disembarked, as are their contacts. This procedure was applied in the case of P-77, with targeted disembarkations. As a preventive measure, the company opted to test all employees on board with RT-PCR tests, a practice already adopted on other platforms.”

For the oil workers’ union, the resumption is being deemed hasty and that the spread of the virus among employees was not contained and will only increase with more people on board, putting the lives of contractors and subcontractors at risk.

Eduardo Henrique Costa, director of the National Federation of Oil Workers and Sindipetro-RJ, stated, “They made the decision to return just when the country is hitting records of deaths due to covid-19 contamination, and they continue to refuse to discuss the conditions for returning with the unions. We believe that now is the time to reduce the workforce on the platforms, not increase it.”

According to the weekly bulletin from the Ministry of Mines and Energy (MME), as of July 20, there were 1,647 infected employees, with 1,452 having already recovered, and three deaths recorded. According to Petrobras, there are currently 187 employees with covid-19.

According to Adaedson Costa, Coordinator of the National Federation of Oil Workers (FNP), Petrobras continues to refuse to discuss returning to work with the unions and that the main concern is the number of people the company will place on the platforms after having reduced the workforce at the beginning of the pandemic.