Sergio Massa’s plan to set wage increases of 60% and contain spending is starting to hit the first hurdles. In the last hours the State Workers Association (ATE) He came out to reject the “salary cap” agreed with the big CGT unions and asked for a sum of $30,000 in view of the peer review, which will be convened in the coming weeks, according to official sources confirmed a clarion.
“It is unacceptable that they try to put a ceiling on the discussion on salaries this year,” warned Monday the deputy national secretary of ATE, Rodolfo Aguiar, after the scheme promoted by Massa to lower inflation expectations was disclosed. two half-yearly agreements of approximately 30% are envisaged for a total of an annual increase of 60%, in line with the inflationary projection of the Budget, with a review clause.
For Aguiar, the official complaint “It is contrary to the free equality that the government has always promoted” and under current management “real inflation has almost always doubled budget forecasts”. In 2021 the forecast was 29% and reached 50.9%, while in 2022 it was projected 33% and was found to be 94.8% per annum. The path traced by the Minister of Economy is also far from the 98.4% estimated by the survey on expectations of the Central Bank (Rem).
In this framework, the government has confirmed that it will convene the state parity review scheduled for this month for the period from June 2022 to May 2023. “We are in talks to meet by the end of the month, certainly the week when news comes”, they reported from an official bureau.
After 2022 inflation hit a record high in 32 years, the union led by Hugo “Cachorro” Godoy sent on Friday a letter to the Minister of Labor, Raquel Kelly Olmosand the Secretary of Public Employment, Ana Castellani, requesting the salary review scheduled for January and a fixed sum of $30,000 for 132,000 civil servants, while UPCN did not comment.
At the end of September, the national administration closed a hike close to 70%, with two tranches of 10% (in November 2022 and January 2023) and an extraordinary sum of $30,000 in December. Now, unions are trying to get closer to 2022 inflation, the highest since 1991, and shape themselves for the next five months before the next deal, in which inflation is expected to reach 32.9%, according to the latest REM .
asks the ATE collide with signals of price stabilization that the government tries to send. Last week, the commerce secretary visited the warehouses of three supermarkets together with Camioneros to check prices and alleged shortages. Massa’s expectation is that inflation in April will not exceed 4%, a percentage that would have to be repeated every month to reach the 60% annual target.
The other challenge is controlling spending before the election. The economy has pledged to the IMF to set a deficit ceiling of 0.3% of GDP until March and 0.8% until June. This implies a major cut in spending relative to GDP, including public salaries due to a staff freeze. The ATE insists on the transfer of 30,000 workers to a permanent establishment, but the government claims that 17,000 jobs have been regularized and 11,000 competitions are underway.
The official diagnosis is that a tax deviation it will put pressure on the issuance of pesos and affect the dollar. Despite budgetary constraints, the rise in parallels reflects that this scenario has already started to materialise.
Source: Clarin
