The pressure of Miguel Ángel Pichetto on the Government, plus that of other allies in Congress, made the Government back down and accept remove from labor chapter of the Bases Law the most articles irritating for the We Make Federal Coalition bloc and other sectors of the dialogue opposition, which are the same ones that the CGT rejected, as anticipated Infobae.
The libertarian turn had another motivation: a last minute negotiation between CGT leaders and the influential presidential advisor Santiago Caputo to talk about the job proposal.
Now, at the end of a day of strong fights that shook the laws that interest the Government the most, would direct the agreement so that the plenary session of committees of the Chamber of Deputies issues an opinion this Thursday on the Bases Law and the fiscal project to deal with the two initiatives in the room between Monday and Tuesday and thus be able to sanction them before the announced May Pact.
According to the new draft corrected by the ruling party, which is already circulating among the deputies, the Government’s labor modernization proposal was 58 items and now It was only 17. That number gives the idea of the sharp reduction of the labor chapter of the Bases Law promoted by the Casa Rosada.
There are no longer so many traces of the DNU stopped by Justice in the new draft that allowed the agreement between the ruling party and the opposition: directly they excluded the articles on solidarity fees, the ultraactivity of collective agreements, the regulation of the right to strike in essential services such as education and changes in the teleworking regime, among others.
Also they took out the penalization of workers’ assemblies that end up becoming covert measures of force and the article that considered union blockades as “serious labor injury as an objective cause for termination of the employment contract.” In this last item, the article that alleviates the pain against those who block a company: DNU 70 said that this action will be repressed with 3 to 6 years in prison and the draft, with 6 months to 3 years in prison.
another article removedwhich appeared in the DNU and the previous draft, was the one that put in check two points of the Employment Contract Law: the principle that in case of doubt the rule most favorable to the worker must be applied and the inalienability, that is , the authorization for employees to voluntarily renounce acquired rights that arise from laws or collective agreements.
The Government also agreed to remove from the new draft of the Bases Law the changes in the telecommuting that were in tune with the business position and the repeal of the Commercial Traveler Regime, two of the articles that were in DNU 70.
There remained, however, those who does not object to unionism: the modification of the fines for unregistered or poorly registered work, the reduction from 8 to 6 months of trial period of workers (it may be extended up to 8 months in companies with 6 and up to 100 workers, and up to 1 year in companies with up to 5 workers) and the authorization for employers and union members to agree in collective bargaining a new compensation based on the UOCRA Labor Termination Fund.
In this way, the CGT already has no arguments to continue objecting to the labor modernization sought by the Government, which even stopped talking about “labor reform” at the request of union leaders. Before this libertarian turn, a Cegetista leader warned that “the draft of labor modernization is same as the DNU that we rejected and Justice suspended”, so “the strike is immovable and will be forceful.” Can the May 9 strike be suspended now?
One of the protagonists of the labor reform negotiations is the Secretary of Labor, Julio Cordero, who maintained reserved contacts with the union leadership to try to reach an agreement, although his efforts entered In crisis when the ruling party whitewashed a draft of the Base Law that included practically the same content as the labor chapter of the DNU.
This new text, which was supposedly reached by agreeing on its articles with the PRO, a sector of the UCR and other opposition blocks of Deputies, was not only refused by the CGT but also by Pichetto, head of the We Make Federal Coalition bench, who this morning said that I would not vote for that project What does the Government want? and pointed out that a comprehensive reform of the labor system must be discussed in a deeper debate with representatives of the union and business sectors.
“When Mr. Cordero, Secretary of Labor, surprises you on a Sunday night and they come with 60 articles… no, I’m not going to vote for that. That was never in the dialoguethat is a surprise attack at night of saying ‘well, the boys are flexible, let’s introduce the labor reform,'” said the opposition deputy in an interview with journalist Jorge Fontevecchia on Net TV. At the end of the day, the surprise was the Government’s decision to agree to the proposals of Pichetto and the CGT to shape a project of light labor reform that could be approved in Congress.
