It is 10:15 on May 9, 2024. General strike in Argentina, called by the CGT. In the amphitheater of the Neuquén Music School is Mario with a cap and white hair that almost touches his shoulders.
–Do you think that this path was laid by someone other than a bricklayer? This, the school, the buildings, the municipality. We bricklayers have made the planet!
He receives a non-contributory pension that does not reach $100,000. He had a stroke at age 59 and always worked in construction. He now sells cement pots.
-We never had registered work. I never had a registered job, due to the fact that they take you “in black”, the majority take you “in black”. The years go by. When you’re young you don’t give it a thought. At your age, come on, but when you’re 60 or so years old you say “on Wednesday” and you look back and say, what about the years? And now I have to retire? and this touches me? Then you have to take out the knife, let’s say.
He is in a relationship with Estela, who is retired from the minimum. He finished primary school and had to go to work very early. She served coffee at the Provincial Council of Education, she was an employee of private homes and with the moratorium she was able to complete a year that she was missing. She has bulging, brown eyes.
-We are worried about what happens to us, but what is going to happen to those who cannot retire. There are people who don’t have a home. We made a house for ourselves. We send the girls to study. I told them: “You don’t have to work as a domestic worker.” Luckily they all studied, the three of them, but hey, we worked, it’s not like they gave us anything.
Estela and Mario are part of the group «Insurgent retirees» that were organized throughout the country against the “Bases Law” promoted by the national government, and that already obtained half a sanction in the Chamber of Deputies.
Among the changes promoted by this project includes the end of moratoriums, which are pension debt payment plans created to regularize contributions to those who do not comply with the required 30 years. Fees are deducted by receipt. The current proposal for this universe of people is to move to a proportional retirement benefit, which represents 80% of a minimum salary, and in the case of women they could only collect it at age 65.
-We made the determination to go out into the streets, get together, that people see us too. There are retirees who cannot buy a kilo of meat. We buy things measured.
The talk was interrupted. “Mario, there are my colleagues, call them,” Estela warned.
Mario brought Vilma. Is plastic artistic. “I made the stained glass windows for the Gregorio Álvarez Museum,” he said. Hair electrified, she holds a sign that says: «Do we vote for this? Traitors to the country. And the photo of a man sitting, covering his face, wrapped in the Argentine flag in front of Anses. He also retired with the moratorium.
-I continue working, because imagine that with $200,000 I don’t know if anyone can live, especially in Neuquén, right? You pay $25,000 for electricity, $20,000 for internet, and then what are you going to eat with? And I pay $100,000 in rent. What am I going to eat with?
It was heard from behind.
-Those are my grandparents! Beautiful.
Maite is one of Mario and Estela’s granddaughters. She studies History teaching at the National University of Comahue.
-The truth is that I feel very proud. They mark the way.
In numbers
«In our province, of the national retirees that we have, 47% were able to retire due to moratorium, of retired women in the province 85% had to go to a pension moratorium«said María Taboada, who was head of the UDAI Neuquén de Anses until December 10.
He pointed out that the first payment plans to cancel contributions They were launched in 2005. «They were not proposed with a gender component, but rather Older adults had to be included at that time of absolute crisis that the country was going through. “We had a very low level of coverage.”he added.
There, the lawyer indicated, “They realized that the main beneficiaries had been women and that is why they began to be called “housewife retirement.” when in reality it was not raised that way.
According to Indec, while six out of ten women accessed retirement in 2001, in 2022 nine out of ten will do so.
The lower participation in the labor market – the majority cannot dedicate the same number of hours since they must divide them with care and upbringing -, access to lower-ranking positions, the wage gap and informality causes women to reach retirement age with fewer years of contributions than men.
If there are no policies that recognize these structural inequalities in the world of work, and try to modify them, it is very difficult to do so later when thinking about the social security scheme.
The last moratorium was launched in April 2023 and will end in 2025, if it is not stopped by the enactment of the law. It has two axes: it allows those people who are already of retirement age to regularize the missing periods until December 2008, and those who are ten years away from reaching retirement age – but know that they do not reach 30 years of contributions – cancel their debt until March 2012.
Of this current plan, Taboada said, there were in Neuquén 4,200 procedures completed, of which 66% were women. The estimate was that about 10,000 people would attend.
«It is impossible to live in a society in which a very important percentage of the population and the most vulnerable is without coverage. If we want to have a fair, dignified society, where we can all see each other in the face, we cannot allow older adults not to access a benefit,” said the former official.
Increases economic dependence and the feminization of poverty
There is a central aspect and that is that the eventual sanction of the “Bases Law” will deepen the economic dependence of women, since the majority will be the candidates to collect the proportional retirement benefit, equivalent to 80% of a minimum salarywhich today is around $242,000.
Unless they receive assistance from their family, receive some type of pension or live as a couple, it will be very difficult for them to support themselves. Without this network they are likely to fall into poverty, since if the current minimum retirement degrades with inflation, a proportional pension will be more than insufficient.
Construction workers, rural workers, commerce workers, trade workers and employees of private homes are some of the sectors that accessed the pension moratoriums.
The gaps in the world of work
66.5% of the contributors to the national retirement fund in the province are men and 33.5% are women. “If that happens in active life, how are we going to be when we retire?” Taboada asked himself. This unequal participation in the world of work is reproduced when comparing those workers who are in a dependency relationship and are discounted (72.5%) with female workers in that same status (27.5%).
It must also be clarified that this third of contributing women do not always work in areas with high salaries, nor do they occupy hierarchical positions, so they will not receive the same retirement amount at the time of retirement. A man who meets all the requirements for years of service and age, who did not need to use the moratorium, today receives an average salary in Neuquén of $612,000, while a woman in the same conditions receives $500,000.
Taboada explained that the social security systems fundamentally have two sources of inequities.
«One is the very design of the system when we propose differential retirements, for example that of judges, and the second source of inequality is precisely The work market. As long as not only market access and conditions cannot be resolved, but also the issue of care work into the home Our situation is going to be inequitable until the moment of retirement,” he stated.
