The president of the national union, Fernando Pereira, warned that freezing wages for one year for sectors in trouble due to the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic will mean that their purchasing power continues to fall.

The secretary general, Marcelo Abdala, assured for his part that ‘although a criterion that we propose is established, that of managing ourselves on the basis of 100 percent of the expected inflation, it seems too short with respect to what happens then in reality.’

Abdala argued that in the terms proposed by the government ‘the recovery will be very slow and what matters to the worker is his salary and purchasing power, not the estimates.’

On the opposite business side, the Chamber of Commerce valued as ‘productive’ the round of collective bargaining, which started hours ago, after having a closer governmental position.

The economist Alejandra Picco from the Cuesta Duarte Institute evaluated had assessed previously that the government proposals ‘break the logic of negotiation’ and also ‘clearly have very negative aspects’ for the salaried workers.

She argued that not only does this impact on the already depressed household income and the impoverishment of the population, but it also domestic consumption suffers from it and postpones the recovery of ventures, which are based on it.

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