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The decomposition of the Argentine middle class

2020-10-24T00:32:45.712Z


With almost a million jobs lost and fewer and fewer formal jobs available, Argentina is going through a process of historical impoverishment that dismembers the middle sectors of society and pushes the country towards extremes of inequality


"The decline began when I lost the other job. If I had known how the situation was going to be, I would have been fighting it there. The point is that at the time I felt very despised. I gave 11 years of my life to the company and I valued like that? ", says Julio Vasta, referring to his work as a driver of intercity buses for more than a decade. In 2017, with an impeccable previous driving record, a car melted and the company decided to evict him. They advised him not to worry and that they were going to get him reinstated immediately, precisely because of his impeccable record, but for Vasta the feeling of feeling betrayed was already too great, and he chose to make an economic settlement for a fraction of what he would have reciprocated and left. She traded stability for dignity.

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With the money from his severance pay, Flavia, his wife, bought an industrial oven and a freezer, so she could make pizzas and empanadas from home.

A few months later, Vasta was offered a job as a long-distance driver.

He accepted, although the job was 900 kilometers from his home in the Cordoba mountains and meant not seeing his daughters and wife.

He started from scratch again at age 44.

For three years he rotated between the firms of the company until the quarantine arrived.

"They compensated me for three months and they didn't pay me more," he explains.

Vasta collected ATP (the government's salary assistance program for quarantine) in June and July.

Since then, and without the company clarifying his situation - it has not formally fired him - he stopped collecting.

“The manager tells me that next year I have the job secured, but how do we make it until next year?” He asks.

The family has survived for two months thanks to the empanadas and pizzas that Flavia cooks;

But as she explains, her work pays only to buy what is fair and not to go hungry.

“Before, with Julio's job we could go on vacation every so often, or go out somewhere on the weekends.

We could choose what to eat, that's a luxury now, ”says Flavia, who chokes with tears in her eyes at the thought of losing or having to leave the house where she was born.

“Taxes I stopped paying.

We couldn't pay for the electricity.

We couldn't pay anything else.

If it continues like this, when the ban on cuts is lifted, they will cut off our electricity, I suppose, they will cut off everything ”.

“It is increasingly difficult to rescue those who remain on the periphery of the system.

When talking about the middle class, many are theoretical definitions that are later difficult to quantify;

It is difficult to establish a percentage or an evolution over time, because it is not only an economic issue, based on a purchasing power that is being lost, but it is a worldview as a stereotype of a middle sector that every country aspires to have.

It is a possibility of progress, an idea that there may be a process of improvement.

That progress can be made;

that there is upward social mobility.

One of the things that one feels as the crises in Argentina are happening is how that mobility is being cut ”, explains in a telephone conversation Eduardo Donza, university professor and Researcher at the Observatory of Social Debt of the Argentine Catholic University.

Argentina came with very high standards of living and atypical compared to those of the region, until the early seventies of the last century.

Contrary to the majority of neighboring countries, which were improving, Argentina began an inverse process with ups and downs: the quality of life has been in almost permanent decline over the last 50 years.

The pandemic and the measures implemented against it has accelerated this process exponentially.

In Argentina the quality of life has been in almost permanent decline over the last 50 years

The Social Debt Observatory estimates that the loss of private employment so far in 2020 exceeds 900,000 jobs, between the informal, mixed and formal economies.

Unemployment is around 15%, but it could be more, since the data only takes into account the population that lost their job and is looking for a new one.

If you add to the one that is not actively looking for because there is no market or it is impeded by quarantine restrictions, the outlook is worse and unemployment is close to 30%.

The fall in Argentine GDP is heading to be the highest of all the G20 member countries, estimated at 13%, the worst in absolute terms in Argentine history, added to the worst labor crisis since 2002. Put in figures , means about 3.8 million people without work.

The Government of Alberto Fernández excuses himself in the pandemic and in the dire economic state of indebtedness that his predecessor left him to explain the current situation;

his predecessor did the same and thus each of the leaders with their predecessors.

In the midst of all this theater of political recriminations, Argentine society ends up more impoverished in each cycle.

"In Argentina we do not have new problems, we have the same old problems as always unsolved.

The country has not had the capacity to generate sustainable productive development over time, the famous state policies, which go beyond the governments of the day.

If the production structure does not improve, we will not be able to move forward ”, says Donza.

"What is being lost is the ability of the middle class to hold onto hope."

“I never imagined living this situation.

Nothing of this;

nor lose my job the way I lost it, nor have to live up to the help of our family.

My in-laws are paying the boys' school fees;

My mother started out concealed, passing by the house every time she did the shopping and left something, a last of cheese, milk, now she directly passes every Thursday and leaves me shopping;

my brother-in-law, who lives in France, sends us money.

It is incredible that this can happen to you in such a short time, to be left with nothing, ”says Marcela Capdevila about her current family situation.

Capdevila, a mother of three children, has worked since 2019 in the human resources area of ​​the El Pilar bakery chain, one of the most important bakeries in Córdoba.

The 37-year-old psychologist, specialized in the labor field, assures that she was a victim of labor and verbal abuse by her company with the aim of making her leave her job.

Finally, she was fired without compensation.

Until the quarantine due to COVID-19, her employment relationship was perfect, she says, but getting rid of her was the lowest cost for the company, given that she was the employee with the least seniority in her area, she explains what happened.

Adrián Villanueva, her husband, is a civil engineer who owns a small construction company and the other breadwinner of the family, but he also saw his income completely paralyzed with the pandemic.

“Our capital is my machinery and a lot where we dreamed of making our house one day.

Today, for the first time in my life, I wonder if we would not have to sell everything now that we can still get something out of it and leave the country.

That thought had never crossed my mind before, ”he says.

I never imagined living this situation.

Neither lose my job the way I lost it, nor have to live up to this level with the help of our family

Marcela Capdevila, woman affected by the economic crisis derived from covid-19

Some of the measures of the state of exception in which Argentina has lived since March 19, when the president announced the first rules of preventive and compulsory social isolation, are the prohibition of dismissals, double compensation in the event of any, and the impediment to declare the bankruptcy of companies.

But they do not seem to have had their effects based on the data and the experience of workers such as Vasta or Capdevila.

And the recovery will be slow and complicated.

"In Argentina we always innovative solutions to go

safando

, but here's a basic problem: it does not generate employment in the private sector ten years ago.

Argentina was going, in any case before the covid to a lost decade, it is ten years of not growing.

At the industrial level, a lot of ground was lost.

If everything were magically solved tomorrow, we would need five years of sustained growth at a rate of 4% per year to reach the economic levels of March this year.

To reach those of 2011, it would have to grow at that rate until 2033 ”, calculates Pablo Dragun, director of the study center of the Argentine Industrial Union.

Vicente Donato, a social science researcher at the University of Bologna and director in Argentina of the Pyme Observatory Foundation, which studies and promotes the development of small and medium-sized enterprises, details the participation of the private sector.

“In Japan there are 90 companies for every 1,000 inhabitants;

in Italy, 60;

in Chile, almost 50. In Argentina there are 20. The country has a very low number of companies for its productive development.

That number reached 50 a few decades ago.

When talking about the middle class, we must also talk about a middle business class.

The main characteristic of less developed countries is that they have micro-enterprises and later, large multinationals;

and in the middle, nothing.

Argentina knew how to have a more complete business fabric, such as the Italian, German or Japanese, where the main productive contribution and added value are the business middle class.

The decline of the middle class has to do directly with the loss of middle class companies.

Without companies there is no future ”.

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Source: elparis

All news articles on 2020-10-24

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