The first union observatory on computer work intends to “make one more contribution from the point of view of the workers,” said its director, Stephen Sargiottowho made an analysis of the laws that regulate and promote the activity such as Software Promotion Law (LPS) and the Knowledge Economy Law (LEC).
According to data published in the Annual Report 2022 “An X-ray of the Software and Information Services (SSI) sector from the perspective of the workers”the Argentine computer industry employs, by the year 2022, more than 142,826 workers mostly in a dependency relationship, and this meant a growth of the 44.5% from January 2017 to December 2022.
However, they stressed that despite being a sector that is growing steadily in terms of employment and receives all kinds of aid, it pays, at the same time, bad wages.
“We find ourselves with a certain mythology that exists about the computer industry, a certain idea that one enters a course of two or three weeks or three months, and that one enters and earns $500,000 or $800,000. It is a very confusing thing. And We said, what is happening? We already knew that this was not the case, because we are a union and we are aware of the situation of the workers,” Sargiotto said during the presentation of the report.
In this framework, they argue that The variation of the IT salary in Argentina reflects a sustained drop over the years and, for the period 1998-2014, a 20% loss was recorded. Meanwhile, for the 2017-2022 period, this historical trend of progressive loss of purchasing power.
“This imbalance is emphasized by the current scenario of an IT industry in full growthwhose billing levels and tax incentives do not result in better salary conditions for their workers,” they stated in the report.
On the other hand, the Observatory highlighted that the Promotion Regime established by the Knowledge Economy Law reached 628 companies“most of them large, very large and some medium”.
Based on requests for reports from the Executive Branch, Sargiotto indicated that the report highlights “the amount of subsidies that (companies) received, which only the Knowledge Economy Law, in two years, was 42 billion pesos”.
“This highlights the extremely important role that the Argentine State has played, always so bastardized and that it is always pointed out as an agent of underdevelopment, as in this case it did not have the opposite. As the Argentine State has been an extremely investor in this “Said Sargiotto, in dialogue with Télam.
In this way, they remarked that the promotion regime mainly benefited four companies: Mercado Libre, Globant, Accenture and Red Link were the main recipients of the previous regime (LPS): until 2019 they received 45.9% of all benefits and only Mercado Libre took approximately 20% of those resources, they highlighted.
“In our view, although there have been improvements in the LEC and we believe that there were some positive developments because smaller companies were included in the new regime, in some way, a concentration logic continues to be maintained that we believe is towards where it should be improved,” Sargiotto said.
In this sense, he added: “If the idea is for it to be a promotion regime and the vast majority are micro and small companies, it should point towards micro and small ones and not towards the mega-large ones, which are only 3% of all computer companies”.
For his part, the general secretary of AGC, Ezekiel Roughsaid that the Observatory is “an initial step”, and affirmed that “we need all four legs sitting down: universities, workers, the State and the Academy. With all these legs, it seems to me that we can better define what data we need, where we are headed, how to be more efficient in the construction of this data in order to later make the best political decisions”.
The presentation panel was moderated by AGC’s Undersecretary of the AGC Union, Manuel Alonso; the director of the OTI, Esteban Sargiotto; the Secretary of Innovation and Future of Work of the CGT, Vanesa Núñez, and the Vice Dean of the Faculty of Exact Sciences of Unicen, Claudio Aciti, together with the General Secretary of the AGC, Ezequiel Tosco.
Source: Ambito
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