The increase also contemplates the month of January, so it will be retroactive. How much was the parity and how much is the basic salary?
For Alejandro DiBiasi
01/28/2023 – 12:00 p.m.
The parities of the automotive industry march “on wheels”, thanks to an agreement established between the Automobile Transport Mechanics and Allied Union (SMATA) with the chambers of the terminals, auto parts manufacturers and concessionaires where inflationary percentages are automatically applied per quarter (in the case of the “verifiers” branch, it is quarterly).
The increase that includes the quarter October, November, December 2022 is 18.39 percent that is applied in full from January 1so it will be retroactive and will be settled at the end of the month or the first days of February.
It is worth clarifying that 18.39 percent is paid directly and not in installments as is common in the rest of the parities, becoming an important benefit for workers in this activity.
From the union they highlighted to iProfessional that “if we take into account that inflation in the last quarter of the year was 16.3 percent (October 6.3; November 4.9 and December 5.1) we are beating the rise in the cost of living by two points, which is not a small thing in the national and international context, where we observe a drop in production and loss of jobs”.
After super bonus, the salary increase will be settled in February
They also indicated that the next salary update will be in April, once the inflation of January, February and March is known, where the same system implemented since 2010 will be applied. A couple of points will be added to the sum of the inflationary percentage for the first quarter of 2023 as income recovery and it will start running from the first of April. In other words, it will have a double impact on May salaries with the retroactive plus the increase.
The diversity of branches and the additional ones attempt against the elaboration of a basic for the activity, but we can take as an example an important automotive that, with the last increase, will pay about 175,500 gross pesos of initial salary.
SMATA’s referent, Ricardo Pignanelli, assured that with this agreement they will exceed inflation by 2 points.
Among the latest achievements obtained by the union headed by Ricardo Pignanelli is the payment of a bonus that starts at 200,000 pesos and reaches 300,000, according to the categories, and that will be settled in the last days of February until March 10. This salary bonus is already in force for the automotive plants, the “verifiers” and the “auto parts manufacturers”, and it remains to close it with the “dealers”.
Bonus to offset the inflationary rise
Union spokespersons stated that “Between October and November, they began to talk about the payment of a bonuswhile the Government was studying how to apply wage aid to sustain wages and internal consumption” and indicated: “Just as we spoke with officials, we did the same with the employers, taking into account the effort made by the mechanics in the midst of a pandemic and the recovery of the automotive industry”.
They stressed that “The idea was that the bonus does not impact the Income Tax and that it comes as a help after the expenses of the vacations and at the beginning of the classes, with the expenses that all that implies”.
On the other hand, Pignanelli expressed the need to double jobs in the industrial sector. In this sense, he explained: “We have 5 million unemployed people that we have to try to get into the industrial world” and added: “We need 16 million industrial workers for the equation to close us down.”
Finally, he assured that “the union has a policy of trying to sit at a table and agree on everything that can be agreed.” “I think we’re at a point where we have to sit down and arrange to produce more jobs because that’s what people need,” she concluded.
