LABOUR-ARGENTINA: Disturbances Over Cut in Unemployment Benefits

By Marcela Valente Reprint | | Print |

Marcela Valente

BUENOS AIRES, May 12 2000 (IPS) - Protesters trashed and set fire to public offices Friday in the northwestern province of Salta, on the border with Bolivia, after police cracked down on a protest by unemployed demonstrators who had been blocking a national highway for the past 10 days.

The disturbances took place in the town of General Mosconi, which sunk into crisis when the state-run oil company YPF was privatised and local refineries were shut down in 1995.

Police were called out for a predawn crackdown Friday on the demonstrators blocking a national highway, Route 34, to protest the suspension of public works programmes that have been paying 2,000 unemployed workers a meagre 160 dollars a month.

Ten people were injured with tear gas and bullets during the crackdown. A trucker held up for days by the roadblock died of a heart attack.

Enraged protesters then headed to the seat of the city government, which they broke into and trashed before setting it alight. The local tax office was also set on fire, and the mayor’s residence narrowly escaped the same fate.

Unemployment officially stands at 13.4 percent in this Southern Cone country, where poverty has climbed to over 37 percent of the population.

But the apparent drop in unemployment from a peak of almost 19 percent in the mid-1990s obscures the fact that many jobless have given up looking for employment, while almost 40 percent of public sector jobs are comprised of unemployed people engaged in public works programmes, and earning a mere pittance.

Since 1997, public works programmes for the unemployed had more or less kept a lid on the social unrest. Unemployed workers have done community work like sweeping streets, cleaning town squares, and janitorial work in hospitals for 100 or 200 dollars a month, in a country where a family of four needs an estimated 1,300 dollars to get by.

But a serious budget imbalance led the government of Carlos Menem (1989-99) to decide last year to suspend the public works programmes. However, President Fernando de la Rúa – who took office in December – announced the cutback, which reduced the 200,000 public works jobs to 37,000.

The first reaction to that measure occurred in Salta in December, when the De la Rúa administration made the announcement. A roadblock was set up, but was lifted after negotiations in which officials agreed to extend the public works programme for a few more months.

Roads were also blocked in the central province of Santa Fe last month, when local authorities warned that social unrest was running high.

The latest crisis in Salta began 10 days ago when some 300 unemployed people parked trucks on Route 34 to block traffic, demanding the two months of backlog pay they are owed for the public works programme.

The protesters were also demanding that the programme not be suspended, but extended for two years instead, and that the benefits be increased from 160 to 200 dollars a month – less than half of the minimum salary of 500 dollars a month.

After police broke up the roadblock, some 10,000 local residents of General Mosconi and the nearby towns of Tartagal and Cornejo marched – with a statue of the Virgin Mary at their head – to block the highway again, but were dispersed with tear gas.

The towns around General Mosconi were also hit hard when the oil refineries shut down five years ago, as few other jobs were available. The public works programme remains the only means of subsistence for thousands of families.

But the protesters’ demands were rejected by the officials sitting on an ad hoc Crisis Committee created at the start of the roadblock, and a federal judge ordered that the road be cleared before dawn, when presumibly there would be no children among the demonstrators.

When the public works programme was first set up under Menem, national benefits were paid out to the unemployed, while the central government diverted tax revenues to the province of Salta in order for it to finance its own assistance programmes.

In the past few days, the national government accused the Governor of Salta Juan Carlos Romero of failing to administer the state budget efficiently, and claimed that the problem had arisen from the province’s plans to cut off its own unemployment benefit programme.

But it was reported that the national unemployment benefits plan was also about to be suspended.

Although he continued to insist that the unrest was a provincial problem, President De la Rúa sent a delegation of government officials to Salta Friday to seek a solution to the crisis, while asking the province’s Catholic bishops to intervene in order to prevent further violence.

Since De la Rúa took office, social unrest has broken out in the northeastern province of Corrientes – where five people were killed when police were called out to remove protesters blocking a bridge – Santa Fe, the western province of Neuquén and the southern province of Tierra del Fuego.

And last month, police cracked down hard on demonstrators outside Congress in Buenos Aires who were protesting a new government-sponsored law making it easier to hire and fire workers, and legitimising the growing precariousness of employment.