Salary negotiations return in the Province / Archive
The Buenos Aires government will convene the state and teachers unions for next Tuesday and in this way will open this year’s salary discussion, in a context in which inflation in January is expected to reach figures similar to those of December and move away from official wishes for a downward curve to begin in 2023.
As this newspaper was able to confirm, the Ministry of Labor would formalize the call today, which, in principle, will have two stages in the case of state unions: on Monday there would be a prior meeting to discuss issues that were pending from last year such as securitizations and promotions and The salary debate would start on Tuesday.
In the case of teachers, they would also be called for Tuesday.
The Province will thus fulfill the promise to convene joint meetings during the first month of the year, as it had promised in December during the discussion of the last stage of the increase corresponding to 2022.
The official idea is not to wait until March to define at least the first increase of 2023, as is usually the case. In part, because salaries would end up suffering a sharp deterioration due to the effects of inflation and because in the middle of it appears the political year in which Kicillof is gambling all his chips in search of re-election.
The call will also coincide in a context in which the Province could be affected in terms of the availability of resources. Although the tap of national funds never stopped for the Buenos Aires government, it is now in doubt how the Nation will make up for the loss of some 110 billion pesos as a result of the Supreme Court ruling that ordered the Nation to return part of the resources that it had taken from the Federal Capital.
In September 2020 and in the midst of a salary crisis with the Police, President Alberto Fernández reduced funds to the Buenos Aires state and transferred them to Kicillof so that he could defuse the conflict. But before the claim of the Buenos Aires mayor Horacio Rodríguez Larreta, the high court issued a precautionary measure that obliges the national government to restore part of those resources.
In this way, the Province was faced with the possibility of losing some 110 billion pesos, as Kicillof raised in recent weeks with the Minister of Economy, Sergio Massa.
In the midst of this uncertainty, the parity will start on Tuesday. Also surrounded by secrecy in the sense of whether it will follow the same scheme of 2022, that is, percentage adjustments that impact the basic and reach retirees, or some other modality is adopted. Also, if the Province’s idea persists that salaries beat inflation, which is projected at 60 percent, but which various consultants estimate would be around 90 percent by the end of the year that has just started.
CLOSURE 2022
Towards the end of December, the Buenos Aires government offered state, judicial, and teachers’ unions an additional 7 percent increase. Thus, in the case of teachers, the average annual increase ended up being 103 percent, while for law enforcement officers 10,430 the increase had a floor of 97 percent.
But the salary adjustment ended up being higher in the case of Education assistants (porters and kitchen assistants) who received an annual increase of 104 percent, which was 105.7 percent for employees in the Health area. In the case of judicial, the improvement ended up rounding 100 percent annually.
Since all these agreed increases impacted basic salaries, they were also received by retirees in each of the sectors.
Thus, last year’s increases imply that salaries remained, on average, some 3 points above inflation in the case of administrative workers and a few more points for teachers, professors, school assistants and hospital personnel.
It is that, according to what was reported by INDEC, the cost of living accumulated throughout 2022 was 94.8 percent.
Now, the Kicillof government is preparing to call the unions to start this year’s salary negotiation (it is presumed that today the call will be formalized through the Ministry of Labor), with the premise that the first part of the improvement will be copper in the first days of March.
