Saturday February 18, 2023 | 10:30 a.m.
President Alberto Fernández announced on Friday, together with the Ministers of Education, Jaime Perczyk, and the Minister of Economy, Sergio Massa, and the Minister of Labor, Raquel Olmos, the agreement with the teachers’ unions to increase the salary of teachers a 33.5% to July and raise the initial minimum wage to 130,000 pesos as of March.
“It is a great joy that we can close this agreement so many days before classes start. That is to give peace of mind to the teachers, who deserve it, and to the Argentine families who know that their sons and daughters will go to school normally,” said the president, while indicating: “I wanted to be present to ratify my commitment to the public education, my commitment to each teacher”.
In this context, he assured that “today we are taking an important step. And I am here because I want all of Argentina to know that they must take care of and protect their teachers, because they train our children, the Argentines of the future”.
“When they govern, people ask for a job. And when we govern, they ask us not to pay wage earners,” he remarked, and concluded: “We in the campaign did not promise that they would stop paying profits, but we were able to do it. We didn’t promise, we did it.”
For his part, Perczyk explained, after the meeting he held with representatives of the CTERA, UDA, CEA, SADOP and AMET unions, that “we have agreed on a joint salary increase for teachers of 17.5% in March which reaches 33.5% in July with revision in May and July”.
In addition, he highlighted the “work and commitment of the unions and the Ministry of Economy to agree on an increase many days before the start of the school year and give certainty and predictability to the provinces”, and specified that the agreement “implies a significant investment by the Government National in the National Teacher Incentive Fund (FONID), in connectivity and didactic material”.
And he stressed: “The political decision of our government was from day one that education workers not only not lose to inflation, but also recover their wages, and this agreement is a sign of that commitment.”
Finally, he pointed out that this consensus “allows us to build normalcy in our Argentina, which in just over 10 days will start the school year with more gardens, more class hours, books for primary and secondary schools, scholarships and the construction of new technical schools.
The agreement establishes that the increase will be 17.5% in March and 8% in May and another 8% in July.
