Sergio Massa's plan to set 60% salary increases and contain spending began to face its first obstacles.
In the last hours, the Association of State Workers (ATE)
came out to reject the "salary ceiling" agreed with large unions of the CGT
and demanded a sum of
$30,000
for the peer review, which will be convened in the coming weeks, as confirmed by official sources to
Clarín.
"It is inadmissible that they try to put a ceiling on this year's salary discussion," warned the national deputy secretary of ATE, Rodolfo Aguiar, on Monday, after the scheme promoted by Massa to lower inflation expectations became known. The idea is that that there be two semi-annual agreements of around 30% to total an annual increase of 60%, in line with the inflationary projection of the Budget, with a revision clause.
For Aguiar, the official claim "
is contrary to the free parities that the government has always propagandized"
and under the current management "real inflation almost always doubled budget forecasts."
In 2021, the forecast was 29% and reached 50.9%, while in 2022 33% was projected and it turned out to be 94.8% per year.
The path traced by the Minister of Economy is also far from the 98.4% estimated by the survey of expectations of the Central Bank (REM).
Within this framework, the Government 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 before the end of the month, surely the week that Come let's have news," they reported from an official office.
After the inflation of 2022 marked the highest record in 32 years, the union led by Hugo "Cachorro" Godoy sent a letter last Friday
to the Minister of Labor, Raquel Kelly Olmos
, and the Secretary of Public Employment, Ana Castellani, in demand for the salary review scheduled for January and a fixed sum of $30,000 for
132,000 public employees, while UPCN did not comment.
The national administration closed an increase close to 70% at the end of September, with two tranches of 10% (in November 2022 and January 2023) and an extraordinary sum of $30,000 in December.
Now, the unions seek to get closer to the inflation of 2022, the highest since 1991, and to outline themselves for the next five months prior to the next negotiation, in which inflation of 32.9% is expected, according to the latest REM.
ATE's demands
collide with the signs of stabilization in prices
that the government seeks to send.
Last week, the Secretary of Commerce visited the warehouses of three supermarkets together with Camioneros to control prices and alleged shortages.
Massa's expectation is that inflation in April does not exceed 4%, a percentage that should be repeated every month to meet the 60% annual goal.
The other challenge is the control of spending prior to the elections.
The economy made a commitment to the IMF to set a deficit ceiling of 0.3% of GDP until March and 0.8% until June.
That implies a greater cut in spending in relation to GDP, including the public salary due to the freezing of personnel.
ATE insists on the transfer of 30,000 workers to a permanent plant, but the government maintains that 17,000 positions have been regularized and there are 11,000 contests underway.
The official diagnosis is that a fiscal deviation will
put pressure on the issuance of pesos and will have repercussions on the dollar.
Despite budget restrictions, the rise in parallels reflects that this scenario has already begun to materialize.
