Following the Government’s announcement of the closure of Télam, the state agency’s controller resolved that the Voluntary Retirement plan will end on May 10. And the next day, it will begin laying off hundreds of employees under the Crisis Preventive Procedure.
The controller of Télam, Diego Chaer, presented a note to the Secretary of State Companies, Chief of Staffwhere it requests that “this Procedure be formally initiated”, for “the implementation of the dismissals of personnel and suspension of current conventional clauses.”
This Procedure will allow the current management of Télam to pay those laid off, starting next May 11, with an equivalent economic formula “at 50% of the current Voluntary Retirement scheme implemented”, as reported by Chaher in that note to which he accessed Clarion.
Until now, only 20% of the agency’s employees signed up for the Voluntary Retirement plan. that the Government implemented in Télam, currently leaving 628 employees, of which 582 are permanent and 46 contracted.
The doors of Télam They have been closed since the beginning of March and employees are prohibited from going to work to that news and advertising agency of the national State. But all those who did not sign up for the Voluntary Retirement plan continue to earn money as if they were going to work.
President Javier Milei announced its closure almost two months ago, when he gave the opening speech of ordinary sessions of Congress. “We are going to close the Télam agencywhich has been used in recent decades as a Kirchnerist propaganda agency,” the President said that Friday night in Congress. Three days later the agency stopped working, its website was taken down, the two headquarters were fenced off. and its employees were “excused” from going to work.
But the reality is that so far 150 employees have signed the voluntary retirements offered by the Government, especially 780 total employees that Télam had when it closed its doors. They do not reach 20% of the total, while 628 continue to receive their salaries as if they were going to work every day and nothing happened there.
Furthermore, despite the cuts made these months by the current management in Télam, with a “comprehensive operating cost reduction plan”the “result achieved to date by all these actions is merely cosmetic when it comes to addressing the challenge of redesigning it and thus favoring the operational continuity of some valuable functions of the organization,” said Chaher in his note sent to the Secretariat. of State Companies, led by Mauricio González Botto.
And he added that “this organization in its current appearance is absolutely unviable if it does not have the million-dollar transfers that the national Treasury regularly makes to cover its operating expenses. To have a general idea of the issue, this State Society has received more than 16,000 million pesos in the last three years to ‘sustain’ its operation”.
“It is important to highlight that the intention of this Administration is to organize and recreate conditions so that – once the necessary optimizations have been made – an adequate management structure is generated that can develop ‘agency’ functions”, the Télam auditor assured in his note to which he agreed Clarion.
The Voluntary Retirement plan and Macri’s background
He “voluntary separation agreement” establishes that those who signed up for the Voluntary Retirement plan until March 31 collected all the compensation in a single installment, along with the salary they were paid in the first days of April; while the rest of those who already signed up for the plan will have to wait until early May to collect it along with their April salary.
“The problem is that when you go to talk to the people in Human Resources, they tell you that The maximum amount they can pay is $23.5 million, beyond the seniority one has in the agency. And that is not a reasonable figure for those of us who have been there for more than 10 years, high positions or those who have union immunity,” a Télam employee told Clarín, unaware that the official plan is to pay half of that figure to the employees. that they do not sign up until May 10 for the voluntary retirement plan.
Another employee explained to Clarín that “Hernán Lombardi fired 40% of the employees, when (Mauricio) Macri governed, of whom the Labor Court ordered more than 200 to return, while the rest accepted the compensation and did not return.
Those rulings against the dismissals of Pousá and Lombardi were becausee had not implemented the Crisis Preventive Procedureas established by the National Chamber of Labor.
The thing is that in June 2018, the management of Rodolfo Pousá in Télam and Lombardi as head of the Public Media System, fired 354 employees, which were 40% of the 878 total employees. But many of those laid off They complained to the Labor Court and 225 were reinstatedthrough a compensation return plan.
Sources close to the management of Pousá and Lombardi defended these dismissals and said that “The total compensation was about US$25 million and half of those fired were left outside Télam. At that time the agency could not be closed without a law of Congress, but now with DNU 70 of Milei it can be done, with a regulatory Decree,” they assured Clarion.
In any case, the current intervention in Télam knows that it cannot fire employees again as the Macri management did, under the risk of having the same judicial problem that Lombardi had almost six years ago.
That’s why, Chaher presented the Crisis Preventive Procedure and plans to fire hundreds of employees under that regulatory umbrella.
But an official source told Clarionwhich at some point during the year intend to resume the activities that Télam did, “under another name and perhaps in another place, with about 200 workers, of which 100 would remain in the news agency and another 100 for official advertising.
We will have to see if that is confirmed and a “restructured Télam” can resume activity, or if it closes definitively the state company.
