Argentine unions toughening stance on salaries following devaluation-driven price hikes.

[forest444]

Key representatives of the CGT labor federation, which had so far remained relatively quiet in terms of protests against the new administration of President Mauricio Macri, called for wage hikes above 30% ahead of this year’s collective bargaining rounds.

Dredging and Signal Workers' union leader Juan Carlos Schmid, a key ally of Teamsters’ leader Hugo Moyano (who heads one of two CGT factions), estimated inflation in 2015 to have reached 28% “even without the effect of the devaluation.” With the recent price hikes following the lifting of foreign currency trade restrictions on December 17, “salary hikes would have to be above 30%,” Schmid said.

Schmid was joined by Health Workers’ union leader Héctor Daer, who said that “prices are moving very fast” due to the devaluation and that even businessmen were admitting that prices hikes have likely exceeded 30%. “The end of the clamp on the dollar and the reductions in export duties affected food prices strongly in December. Macri's decision to anticipate they would carry out a devaluation was a mistake,” Daer said, adding that “businessmen are already considering hikes above 30%” for when collective bargaining talks conclude in February and March.

Even Restaurant Workers' union leader Luis Barrionuevo, who had endorsed Macri, suggested that he would ask for 50% hikes if inflation reached those figures; his splinter CGT Azul y Blanca labor federation is smaller and less influential than the two main CGT and CTA federations (the CGT and CTA each split in 2011, with the majority factions in each endorsing former President Cristina Kirchner's successful reelection campaign that year and the minority factions adopting a more combative stance).

The leader of the CTA federation's Kirchnerist-leaning faction, Hugo Yasky, condemned Finance Minister Alfonso Prat-Gay’s statement that “unions would have to think about what to prioritize: salary levels or jobs.” In an interview published yesterday in Página/12 Yasky declared that “we won’t accept blackmail such as Prat-Gay’s, who is recognizing in those words that he is part of the business groups that want to take back the rights gained by workers throughout these years. We will also resist decisions that imply turning salaries into company profits.”

Yasky’s union is in talks with UOM metal workers’ union leader Antonio Caló, who also leads the CGT faction that had supported the Cristina Kirchner administration, in order to coordinate their policies going forward.

At: http://buenosairesherald.com/article/206044/moyano%E2%80%99s-cgt-toughens-stance-on-salary-demands
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Orlando Ferreres (a Menem-era official whose CPI estimates were favorites of the Argentine right, until Macri took over that is), projects that inflation, which was 25% in 2015 according to MIT, will, thanks to Macri's devaluation and other policies, be no less than 38% in 2016. Macri had made "reducing inflation to single digits" a key campaign slogan.

[Judi Lynn]

1. Macri had to pinch himself to keep from laughing,promising a reduction of inflation to single digits

How could anyone have been slow-witted enough to swallow that one?

The workers are going to go through hell trying to keep their heads above water, after being already warned “unions would have to think about what to prioritize: salary levels or jobs.”

It sounds as if they are going to have a nightmare ahead, just like the one they remember. This is hell on the working class.

[forest444]

2. Argentina is stumbling over the same stone again, as it were.

I remember you once posted an excellent article that tied the policy of wage suppression during the 1976-83 dictatorship (especially in its early years) to a sharp increase in corporate profits - until in 1981 that is, when deregulation-fueled financial fraud pulled the rug out from under everyone: employers, workers, the self-employed, retirees, and all (everyone except the speculators, many of whom supported and were connected to the dictatorship).

History then repeated itself in 2001, of course. This time, it remains to be seen; but it's certainly starting to look that way.