Decree 841/2022 signed by President Alberto Fernández on December 17 has not yet completed its first two weeks of validity. It establishes the payment of a “one-time non-remunerative allowance” of 24,000 pesos for wage earners who receive less than 185,000 pesos per month. “It will be paid by the employers in the month of December 2022,” the text states.
Its application was part of a long internal debate in the Government on the most effective palliative for mitigate the effect of inflationbut in its first steps it already reaped non-compliance, criticism and an injunction presented this Thursday so that a sector does not pay for it.
Within the Cabinet they justify the implementation of the measure and recognize that the implementation of a bonus in this inflationary scenario was going to be resisted by different business chambers. They knew in advance that the first stone would come from the Argentine Industrial Union (UIA), because they had already advised against this resource when they did the first surveys.
And when the measure was already confirmed, the business chamber issued a statement where it stated “concern about the impact it will have on the productive sector the modality under which the granting of a bonus for private workers will be implemented”.
They repeated in public what they had held in private to ponder the importance of joint agreements and that everything should have been resolved within that framework.
“Currently, the industry has more than 800 collective agreements in full force, agreements that are the result of consensus between workers and employers. During 2022, joint negotiations have been reopened and have functioned as an effective mechanism to respond to the problem of inflation”, defended the UIA, and warned that this bonus “affects the dynamics of recomposition of the purchasing power of wages, generating distortions and unpredictability in the operation of one of the most important assets that industrial workers and businessmen have coined for years: parity“.
The bonus was part of an internal debate in the Government on the most effective palliative to mitigate the effect of inflation
Until Thursday, the complaints had not gone beyond the power of the lobby of the industrial sector. The big players only insisted on complying with the parity agreements, but they amplified the smaller ones, especially the SMEs, so that they would whitewash that they would not pay it.
Year-end bonus of 24,000 pesos: the prosecution began
However, the debate was prosecuted with an amparo presented by the Association of Private Clinics, Sanatoriums and Hospitals (ACLISA) based in Córdoba. For this reason, it was left in the hands of federal court No. 1 of that province. The proposal maintains that the decree is unconstitutionalbecause the Executive does not have “powers to legislate in the referred matter” and because it is originated in “issues unrelated to those described in the text itself, most probably political and related to the inexperience of the state itself in economic matters.”
The letter entered two days before the closing of the judicial year. They did not enable the fair to deal with it in January. The ACLISA will have to wait until February to hear a response from the Justice and it is possible that the case will stretch over time or become an opportunity for those who resorted to an amparo to avoid paying a bonus of 24,000 pesos.
The letter, which was anticipated by the newspaper La Nación, reveals that the plaintiffs resort to issues of a constitutional nature, but do not use any labor argument.
“There is not only a severe economic grievance, of an enormous nature, that due to its notoriety and arbitrariness that conspires against the most elementary notion of legal certainty, understood in the legal context of a Rule of Law, but also a material impossibility of facing the payment unconstitutionally decreed”, maintains the amparo. The arguments of the lawsuit were not enough to enable the judicial fair.
Financial impact on SMEs due to the payment of the bonus
Meanwhile, the cameras will continue with the public criticism that is accompanied by the non-payment of the bonus. One of those that reinforced this idea is the Argentine Chamber of Medium Enterprises (CAME). Its president, Alfredo González, considered that “it is clear that our collaborators lost purchasing power due to inflation. But the correct framework to recover it is parity, many of them still open, as is the case of the merchant, the largest in the country “, he insisted.
The non-remunerative payment at the end of the year was prosecuted with an amparo presented in Córdoba
A “greater purchasing power could boost domestic consumption. But the situation for SMEs is not easy because this month the second half bonus must also be paid“, emphasized González, without mentioning that the bonus is of a non-remunerative nature, so they try to absorb it with the figures of the same nature that arise from joint negotiations and their updates.
“Many of the SMEs we represent are monotributistas and will not be able to bear the financial impact of this measure, since the deduction mechanism of 50% of the bonus in the Income Tax does not contemplate them”, CAME maintained and demanded that they review the measure.
In the Government they doubt the success that the judicialization of the bond can have. So far there has been no response and outside of the complaints and attempts to not pay it, the main unions have not denounced the systematic non-compliance in the payment of the bonus. They admit that the late implementation got in the way of the payment of the half Christmas bonus and that opens up new conflicts due to the delay in its payment, but until now there have been no complaints of massive non-compliance by large companies.
