The Government is studying alternatives to improve the lowest salaries. Fixed sum or new “salary floor”. In parallel, it will initiate the discussion with the companies to renew Fair Prices.
The Government will seek to recompose the income level of wage earners In the next weeks. It is one of the challenges outlined by the Minister of Economy, Sergio Massa, for after the primary elections. The discussion at this time involves granting a fixed sum or to establish a new “salary floor”. In parallel, the Palacio de Hacienda will have to discuss the renewal of the Program Fair Pricesa hard stop with the industry that demands greater increases due to the rise in costs.
The times and the context. Contrary to what was pointed out by some sectors of the opposition, there was nothing similar to a “platita plan”. On the contrary, with the impact of the drought that reduced collection, the Government had to adjust spending month by month and, perhaps for this reason, it did not speed up some of the measures it is studying. Among them, an improvement in the wages Lower.
So far, analyzed two options. On the one hand, the idea of a lump sum gains ground. It is not the first time that this option has been put on the table and it is not the first time that unionism has rejected it on the grounds that this would be detrimental to parities. The virtue that the Government sees in this tool is that it would help boost the lowest wages.
The second option is establish a new salary floor similar to what is established in the basic basket that measures the INDEC. This idea would have the particularity that it could include more than a million municipal workers who today are outside even the vital and mobile minimum wage. “Today, most of the working poor are municipal. There are municipalities in the interior of the country and in the Buenos Aires suburbs that earn $50,000 or $60,000,” a government official told Ámbito.
At the end of June, according to the official institute, the total basic basket is close to $232,000. One of the questions that arise, in case of advancing with the new salary floor, is how the municipalities will do to face the expense that it would imply. “We will have to see, but there are many districts that have the equivalent of a year of public administration leveraged in fixed terms,” they point out from the Casa Rosada.
Regardless of the decision that is made, a complementary challenge will be that this salary increase does not evaporate immediately due to a new acceleration in inflation. On this point, the Government has a difficult stop: the renegotiation of the Fair Prices programwhich expires on August 17 and has been a fundamental barrier to stop the escalation of essential products in large supermarkets.
The Mass consumption companies demand double-digit increases to “compensate” for the rise in costs that they have been suffering. As they explain, the gap between their increases and that of their suppliers was aggravated by the new measures taken by the Government to add the Country tax on imports of goods and international freight. They anticipate that the debate will be tense.
For this week, the Minister of Economy Sergio Massa has an intense agenda planned that includes the preparation of the 2024 budget with “zero deficit”, facilities to import with their own dollars, new disbursements from multilateral credit organizations will also be announced.
Source: Ambito
