LABOUR-ARGENTINA: Protests Decry Gov’t Failure to Keep Promises

By Marcela Valente Reprint | | Print |

Marcela Valente

BUENOS AIRES, Jun 29 2001 (IPS) - Workers from the education and health sectors protested Thursday in the streets of the capital against the Fernando de la Rúa government’s policies, which they say have fallen far short of promises to strengthen these two areas and to fight unemployment in general.

The Labour Ministry admitted that the forecasts included in a study underway show that unemployment rose from 14.7 percent of the economically active population last October to more than 16 percent this month.

Meanwhile, education and public health employees gathered Thursday to protest decisions made by the centre-left Alianza government, which they say cause further harm to the low-income and unemployed sectors of the population.

Dozens of ambulances formed a convoy through Buenos Aires to demand the re-institution of PAMI, the largest state-run social services and health entity in the country, which provides medical coverage, meals and other services to pensioners, disabled individuals and the poor.

The government decided to redistribute the services offered by PAMI, an agency that until now had benefited 3.5 million people, and to eliminate a series of regulations, which in practice implies drastic cuts in services.

Taking part in the demonstration, which arrived at the doors of the Argentine Congress, were doctors and other health specialists, cancer patients who face losing the medications they had been receiving free of charge, families of patients awaiting organ transplants, and retirees who will lose their free meals.

Family members of the ill from the Argentine interior who had to travel to Buenos Aires for medical treatment also took part in the protests.

Criticisms about the alleged poor management of PAMI can be heard among the ranks of the governing Alianza coalition itself. Legislative deputy María América González, for example, demanded that the agency present its financial accounts before Congress.

The demonstration in defence of PAMI was preceded by a protest organised by professionals from the Ameghino Mental Health Centre. The Buenos Aires institution attends nearly 200,000 people each year, free of charge.

Union leaders from the Centre reported that only 120 of the 450 people who have worked there for the last 15 years receive regular paychecks.

Despite numerous complaints, they have been unable to win the implementation of a budget that has already been approved by the Buenos Aires municipal legislature for 160,000 dollars annually.

Teachers’ unions convened the third demonstration that passed through the streets of the Argentine capital Thursday.

Education employees halted their work to march to the Plaza de Mayo, outside the presidential palace, to demand payment of their back-wages and to protest against the freeze on the national education budget.

The Confederation of Education Workers of the Argentine Republic (CTERA) has a history of conducting unique protests. From Apr 2, 1997, to Dec 30, 1999, its members maintained their protest in a tent erected outside Congress.

The tent’s occupants, who took turns lasting weeks at a time, held hunger strikes to underscore their demands for wage increases and a larger national education budget.

Teacher salaries in Argentina range from 280 to 500 dollars a month, not counting tenure bonuses.

Upon taking office in December 1999, the De la Rúa government promised it would pay a so-called “teacher incentive” – with a budget set at 600 million dollars annually. The official pledge led the teachers to take down their protest tent.

The demand laid down by the teachers this Thursday is, precisely, payment of the “teacher incentive” quotas they were due to receive throughout 2000.

But they also expressed fear that this benefit would be suspended for next year and warned about the impacts of a five- year freeze on the education budget.

Marta Maffei, a CTERA leader, hinted that the tent might be erected once again outside Congress, a decision that will be made in September, after giving the government time to include the teacher bonus in the bill on the 2002 national budget.

Maffei stressed that many schools throughout the country are suffering “very grave” problems because of financial shortfalls.

Scholarships for low-income students have been suspended, the services provided by school cafeterias have been slashed, and in some provinces the teachers are paid with credits instead of cash, explained the union leader.

Teachers from a private school in Buenos Aires province told IPS they had decided to join the protests of their colleagues from the public schools because they, too, had not been paid their full wages.

“Eighty percent of the private high school’s budget is financed by the tuition paid by the students’ parents, the rest comes from subsidies from the Buenos Aires provincial government,” said one of the teachers.

“But the province is bankrupt, it suspended all credits and has no more money. I asked the teachers not to take part in the strike so that they do not upset the parents who keep the school operating,” the high school’s director and owner told IPS.

Teachers at another private school in the city of Buenos Aires decided against joining the strike, in spite of agreeing with the protesters’ demands.

“The crisis is so severe that we are on the verge of closing, so we are trying to avoid conflicts with the parents – which is why we are not joining the strike,” a mathematics teach at the school told IPS.