A mobile cameraman, editor, photographer and assistant of the popular street news, earns 160 thousand pesos. The salary, in addition to being starvation, is informal and borders on slavery. Labor rights, in the Misiones media, do not exist, travel expenses are not enough and sometimes there are no free days or holidays either.
On the official channel the situation is not very dissimilar and may even be worse. The hiring conditions are multiple, the vast majority of them at a level of humiliation and mistreatment, which keeps the workers silent, disorganized and some making particular arrangements to survive.
There are those who have a contract with the Police and are attached to the channel. In the logic of multimedia and endorsed by the provincial executive, it means that the Misiones police pay that salary. To give just one of many examples, this means that currently a police officer who covers police, trials, among other topics earns well above the salary of a monotributist journalist or one hired by the company Marandú Comunicaciones, which is around 200 thousand pesos.
For some workers at Multimedios SAPEM or other private media, it is humiliating and even embarrassing to say how much they earn. Above all because the official Channel 12 and those that receive millionaire sums from official and innovative guidelines are the media that hire workers in the most irregular and precarious ways with salaries of between 160 and 200 thousand pesos.
Those who win the provincial elections and currently govern, maintain an entourage of enslaved workers – and it is not understood how – very well tamed. It can be assumed that at the cost of mistreatment, humiliation, persecution and censure. Some workers are afraid of losing the job in which they are paid 180 thousand pesos, others have received threats of different tenors, but all of them worrying; and others knew how to dress up as jesters or buchones. In this way, a leadership of 3 people embezzles the provincial channel’s cash at the expense of pushing its workers into poverty.
No media worker in Misiones reaches a salary that covers the basic basket, which in April was 828 thousand pesos. I’m talking about the workers who pull cables and operate transmissions, of those who postpone their lives to unrecord an audio of the governor, of those who after hours look for the scoop or review the content so that a news story is published. I’m talking about the workers who know that in Misiones not everything is the pink world that the official channel tries to impose, but we can’t say anything, not even in our most personal or close spheres. It happened to more than one that their boss in a friendly and cynical way suggested that they delete certain content from their social networks; today, just imagining that pressure gives you chills.
Being a journalist, communicator or press worker in Misiones is a scary movie. Fear, because you don’t know when you’ll lose your job. Generally, those who are hired are hired for six months. The same day they make you sign the contract, with Marandú Comunicaciones for example, they force you to endorse your undated resignation. You may wonder if there is proof of this. I am sorry to tell you that the secretary who handles the “procedure” does not allow taking photographs, she also takes care of her job and the property of those who in her free time send her to walk the dog that is alone, poor thing, in her luxurious apartment in the or the boss. On the best of days he only has to deal with ordering, paying for and picking up healthy food from his boss.
What role do missionary journalists and communicators have in the current outbreak that some dare to call the incipient missionary wave?
The province is experiencing one of the most acute crises in the last 20 years. Social discontent resulting from a long economic suffocation of all public administration workers and a large part of the private sector, took to the streets in the last week.
Mobilizations, camps, roadblocks and protest actions by teachers, health personnel and provincial security forces are news on the front page of the national media. Provincial and municipal ecology employees, park rangers, taxi drivers, judicial and energy employees joined the explosion. On the afternoon of Wednesday, May 22, students and workers from the university took the torch march to Uruguay Avenue and Trincheras, where the spicy crisis scenario that Misiones has been experiencing has been taking place for almost ten days. They thus added their voice and university demand to the long list of requests and emergencies that the Government of the Renewal Front of Social Concord has not yet responded to.
Added to the uncertain panorama that the missionaries are experiencing is the marked absence of the Minister of Finance, the apostle Adolfo Zafrán, who should give arguments about the destination of the missionaries’ money.
Provincial media shielding is perverse. It hides and silences the reality that the red land experiences, even more so in this context in which missionary voices that question the official story of the Front that leads the driver are becoming widespread, nationally and internationally.
The unconditional communication apparatus that the Provincial Government has, which broadcasts on radios, portals, channels and the print press stories that reach the absurdity of being so far from reality, is sustained by the work of thousands of hard-working journalists and communicators, historically condemned to poverty and psychological instability as a result of persecution, hardship and precariousness.
Open letter from a press worker from Misiones
If you enjoy what we do, join the Community
We set ourselves, and we propose to you, the goal of reaching 10,000 collaborators who are connected in the coming months.
Whether we can reflect reality from below and fight the big media of power also depends on you.
In order to continue growing, join the La Izquierda Diario Community.
