After participating as the majority union in the joint hearings of salary regimes 15 and 05, which were held in the Undersecretariat of Labor, the ATE Mendoza presented a series of points contemplated in previous joint agreements, which the Government never complied with. In addition, he rejected the salary proposals that were presented to him and called a General Assembly for July 2.
“Before the Government issued a salary proposal, we denounced the equal non-compliance with previous salary agreements, referring to transfers to the ward, change of regime for Nursing Graduates, and violation of the rights of radiology technicians and Bioimaging graduates. Therefore, if the Executive Branch does not back down regarding the damage to the workers’ working conditions, it cannot issue a salary proposal,” revealed Roberto Macho, General Secretary of ATE Mendoza, after pointing out that “the previous salary parity It was poorly settled by the Government, it did not reach the workers’ pockets. Discounts were given to many other state colleagues. That is to say, they did not receive the salary increases. Since the last joint meeting, the Executive Branch wanted to impose a classroom item in this sector. “An aspect that we reject and denounce at this time.”
On the other hand, ATE reported that the regime changes were not granted to Nursing graduates and that they want to add 20 more hours of work per week to radiology technicians and Bioimaging graduates, for the same salary.
“That is what came out of the Legislature, violating the natural areas of discussion: the joint negotiations,” they stressed from the CDP, before specifying that today the Government has more than 3,380 workers in precarious working conditions, but is not contemplating passes to the plant for contractors or providers.
Furthermore, with the Health Emergency decreed by the Executive Branch, it is directly purchasing supplies and transferring workers to other more distant departments, thus violating their job stability, function and workload.
“All of this is what the Government has failed to comply with, wanting us to evaluate a 5% salary proposal for each of the next three months. A worker’s salary has to be above a million pesos and his colleagues want to make it to the end of the month with that. Furthermore, constant inflation and devaluation have allowed purchasing power to plummet, with a double minimum wage that today is around 500,000 pesos. So, not only do state employees not make ends meet, but even less so when their working conditions are changing,” Macho emphasized.
For the head of the CDP “our union is willing to maintain dialogue with good faith in negotiation and not with these Government traps that harm the salary and working conditions of the workers.” He also pointed out that “we respect the parity sphere, but we do not accept that legislators approve laws that modify and violate the working conditions of the workers of the Provincial Public Administration.”
Macho also noted that “thus, between midnight and midnight, the Government orchestrated modifications to Law 5811; workers’ compensation payments; workloads of radiology technicians and nursing graduates; and transfers of Health and Social Development workers and for us these issues should have been discussed at the joint level, and not in the notary office into which the Legislature was transformed.”
In this sense, the ATE highlighted that the workers are resisting, but the pressure they are exerting against the working class, the lack of consumption and the creation of genuine sources of work is overwhelming. “We pursue the common good for the entire working class, but the Government is not interested in this. This goes beyond a salary increase that all workers need. Public Health is being destroyed and Public Administration is beginning to disappear, to give way to the privatization of all state services. It is the same thing that President Javier Milei proposes, knowing that Governor Alfredo Cornejo is totally operative about that. We saw it with the approval of the Bases Law, where he ordered all his legislators to raise their hands,” Macho stressed in this regard.
As a final consideration, the head of the CDP pointed out that “it is one thing to be voted to govern a nation or a province, and quite another thing is to take possession of a social license to do with the people and with their resources, what that one wants. Therefore, we are talking about a pressure cooker that is going to explode at any moment.”
