The meeting, on Tuesday afternoon, lasted more than four hours at the headquarters of the former Ministry of Labor, on Alem Avenue.
At 3:00 p.m., the heads of the three aeronautical unions that last week had called for this Wednesday's strike arrived:
Pablo Biró
(pilots),
Edgardo Llano
(ground personnel) and
Rubén Fernández
(senior personnel) along with a dozen companions who They presented themselves as members of the board of directors.
The senior staff attended for Airlines, headed by
Fabián Lombardo
, and for Intercargo there was the Secretary of Transportation,
Franco Mogetta
.
The third leg was the mediator designated by Labor.
An aside: in a room next door, the teaching unions were negotiating whether
classes would start next week or not.
In the case of aeronautics, they are all
old acquaintances
: the three chiefs have been at the head of their respective unions for
one or two decades
(Biró, the most "new", has headed APLA since January 2013).
Lombardo, president of Aerolíneas for three months, is also a
veteran
: he joined Aerolíneas in 2009, under the management of Mariano Recalde, and remained there until December 2015. He left for Macri's four years to work for Brazilian airlines. and Portugal and returned to Aerolíneas as commercial director in December 2019, summoned by the management headed by Pablo Ceriani for the next four years.
There is another old acquaintance of all, who did not participate yesterday: it is
Ricardo Cirielli
, the driver of APTA (aeronautical technicians).
Cirielli is a member of the "United Aeronautical Unions" alliance along with the other three unions, but APTA
decided not to go on strike
.
Cirielli, who in 2001
led a historic strike by his union against the Spanish leadership of Aerolíneas
, this time considered that it was "too early" to break ties with the Government.
In the story, Aerolíneas is not doing badly: the leadership of La Cámpora announced out loud, shortly after the November ballot, that the airline
did not need subsidies from the State during the second half of 2023
and that it was also going to leave to the new administration a cash of
350 million dollars,
made up of the advance sale of tickets for the high season and a bonus of 100 million dollars (of which half had been subscribed by the State itself, through the Anses).
That story
held up exactly until today:
the aeronautical strike showed, white on black, that in order to be able to give a modest salary increase (it was equivalent to what the state-owned UPCN had obtained)
government subsidies were needed
, as the man himself told it. Ruben Fernandez.
"They called us to work at 3:00 p.m., after they told us about the possibility of an agreement that the three unions had negotiated the day before," said Fernández, at a press conference at the Pilotos headquarters.
"There was discussion and a lot of progress was made and finally minutes were signed. In reality we signed them: there were two minutes and a third is pending, when the situation was delayed. At that moment an official says they are calling us."
The official was
Mauricio González Botto
, who reports to the Chief of Staff,
Nicolás Posse
.
The union members did not know who he was, but when González Botto returned from his phone call it was clear that the meeting
was over.
"He comes back and
says that the Minister of Economy, Toto Caputo, had disavowed it
," added Fernández.
"Everything we had talked about, everything we had been working on with government officials who agreed to a negotiation ended up breaking down."
From there, the press conference became a diatribe by the unions against the Minister of Economy and against the foreign investment funds that, in the vision of the unions, want to keep Aerolíneas for coins and
then scrap it and release it. the competition.
In fact,
Javier Milei
himself has been the one who
encouraged
this version of the unionists, by ordering through DNU 70
the elimination of all legislative articles that shield Aerolíneas
from both foreign and internal competition.
That legal protection was not invented by Kirchnerism (it began with the de facto government of Onganía) but the 2008 re-nationalization
was what established by law the obligation of the State to grant subsidies to Airlines.
Caputo's disavowal not only confirmed that
the company's
turnover is not enough, that it needs
funds from the Government
to continue operating.
How many?
In March Aerolíneas should present its 2023 balance sheet, audited by an independent international firm.
There you will see how much is real numbers and
how much is story
.
The union members did not hide the discomfort in which they are moving at this time.
They complained that they were the ones who wanted to talk and that
they have no interlocutors
in the Government.
Biró avoided inflammatory statements and limited himself to outlining that what follows
could have a new milestone during Holy Week.
Lombardo
was the last to leave the meeting
at Work, after 7:30 p.m.
When he took office, two months and two days ago, he responded to
Guillermo Ferraro
, the resigned Minister of Infrastructure, and today, in theory, his direct responsibility is
Mogetta
from Córdoba .
After yesterday's meeting it was clear that everything he does at Aerolíneas
depends on the approval of the Economy.