LABOUR-ARGENTINA: Protesters Demand Continued Public Works Benefits

By Marcela Valente Reprint | | Print |

Marcela Valente

BUENOS AIRES, May 11 2001 (IPS) - Three years ago, Juan Carlos Alderete secured a spot in a public works programme in Argentina that provided him 250 dollars a month for digging ditches and fixing sidewalks. The stipend was later reduced to 160 dollars, and last month it was simply not paid.

“You just can’t imagine what that income meant for us,” the 48-year-old former metalworker told IPS.

Alderete, who was left without a stable job in 1996, and his wife and three of his five kids are living in one of the 200 tents set up last Monday in the poor Buenos Aires suburb of La Matanza, which gave the impression of a refugee camp on Friday.

Around 5,000 demonstrators are blocking the highway that runs through the area, to demand the reinstatement of a wage transfer of 120 or 160 dollars a month – a mere pittance in a country where 500 dollars is estimated as the bare minimum with which a typical family can get by, but the only income received by thousands of families in this Southern Cone country of 37 million.

Argentina remains in the grip of a nearly three-year recession. Unemployment currently affects close to 15 percent of the economically active population, while an additional 14 percent is under-employed, and a hard-to-calculate number of people have simply lost all hope of finding a job and no longer even show up in the statistics.

The government implemented public works programmes in portions of the country facing critical situations, as a social safety net providing temporary income support for poor, unemployed workers.

But without any explanation, the government of Fernando de la Rúa stopped paying benefits last month in La Matanza, spurring this week’s roadblock.

In a parallel case, the Buenos Aires ombudsman’s office last month discovered the diversion of funds from another temporary employment programme, known as ‘New Labour Roles’, which was to provide 200 dollars a month to around 5,500 unemployed workers.

The programme, run by the Buenos Aires city government, has had its budget cut from nine million dollars a year to 1.3 million dollars, due to the irregularities.

The suspension of the La Matanza public works benefits and the discovery of the misuse of funds from the ‘New Labour Roles’ programme highlighted the two problems that head the list of pressing public concerns today in Argentina: unemployment and corruption.

The La Matanza public works programme payments were cut off due to a shortfall in funds, while the Buenos Aires unemployment funds were used for political ends by the governing centre-left Alliance, according to the Buenos Aires ombudsman’s office.

The benefits of the Buenos Aires city government’s programme aimed at providing training and support income for unemployed heads of household actually went to university students, public employees and political leaders – all of them members of the parties making up the governing coalition, the ombudsman’s office reported.

The city government turned the money over to non-governmental organisations set up to administer the funds in the interests of the party, to keep party members politically active.

Among those who received the benefits were around 100 people living in Recoleta, the most exclusive Buenos Aires neighbourhood, families in which several members were paid stipends, and even public employees earning upwards of 2,000 dollars a month.

But in the camp set up by the unemployed in La Matanza, the demonstrators were too busy trying to find food for their children to pay much attention to the corruption scandals that have been getting such high-profile coverage from the press and TV talk shows.

“We have all the time in the world to stay here,” La Matanza resident Luis D’Elía, one of the leaders of the Congress of Argentine Workers (CTA), told IPS. “There’s not much to choose between staying at home without doing anything and coming to the highway” to protest, he said.

D’Elía heads an organisation that represents unemployed workers from La Matanza, a municipality of 1.6 million people, more than the total number of inhabitants of several of Argentina’s provinces.

Over the past decade, roadblocks have become a preferred form of protest by unemployed workers in Argentina, who found that it was the only way to force society and authorities to pay attention to their plight.

Besides the La Matanza camp, which is the biggest, there are three others in the northwestern province of Jujuy, on the border with Bolivia, set up by demonstrators who are demanding that the government make good on its promises to set up public works programmes.

The De la Rúa administration admits it is worried about the new wave of roadblocks, which have begun to crop up again after several months of relative calm.

A number of barricades set up last November had been voluntarily taken down by the protesters when the government promised new temporary employment plans.

In La Matanza, demonstrators agreed to abandon their protest at that time, after the government pledged to leave 8,400 employment plans in place, to provide two million dollars in medicines and tools, 20,000 pairs of shoes and 1,000 scholarships for students, and to build 30 schools.

The authorities, however, failed to abide by the terms of the agreement. “The work plans were reduced to 3,400, and now, without any explanation, they have simply stopped paying,” said D’Elía.

“The shelf life of the medicines they sent us had already expired, and we have seen neither schools, nor shoes, nor the public works that they promised us in order to create sources of employment,” the leader of the CTA, one of Argentina’s three central trade unions, added.

More than 106,000 residents of La Matanza are currently without a job, and the 120 or 160 dollars a month was the only income received by thousands of families.

Alderete, the former metalworker, told IPS that he had lived in La Matanza since he got married, nearly 22 years ago. Besides his years in the metal industry, he worked as “a driver for a textile factory, and was in charge of the goods yard for a dairy company.”

When he began to take part in the public works programme, he and his family spent the entire monthly stipend “on food, despite the fact that we have soup kitchens here, which we supply by soliciting merchandise in the stores. If it were not for my two sons-in-law and a brother of mine who has an eating establishment, I don’t know what would have become of us,” he added.

Two of the three children still at home with Alderete and his wife are in grade school. But their 16-year-old son had to drop out of high school to work in a bakery.

“Luckily, the house is ours,” he said proudly, explaining that after he and his wife occupied a plot of land with other families 17 years ago, the provincial government ended up purchasing the property, parcelling it up, and selling it to the residents, who paid small installments.

“Of course we don’t pay for power or gas or any other public service, because we simply cannot afford it,” said Alderete.

He maintained that the government’s fears of violent protests were unfounded, because the La Matanza demonstration is a peaceful one.

The government “always says we are violent because we block roads, but it is they who are destroying the country, and they want to come here now and destroy us as human beings,” he complained.

Argentina’s leaders “can go to TV shows to talk about the country’s problems whenever they want. We, on the other hand, have to barricade a road to get our problems heard, because that’s the only way to get on TV,” he remarked.