In our post "Killing the goose that lays the golden eggs". We reflect on the tyre crisis 🛞, a conflict that lasted for months, in which dozens of conciliation hearings failed, and which reached the point of affecting the supply of tyres for the entire production chain.
😡 To this lack of agreement through dialogue, blockades and threats were added, a methodology illegal, authoritarian y undemocraticwhich violates fundamental rights guaranteed by our Constitution: the right to freedom of movement, the freedom of movement and work.
This week, all Argentines, besieged by a rampant inflation that gives no respite, fed up with impassable streets and roads, will once again hear the threats of the all-powerful truckers' unionHe warned that if their demands are not heard, "the tyre strike is going to be a mere peanut compared to what we are going to do".
📉 A course of action that adds up instability y anguish to our social coexistence and damages, even more, our already damaged labour market.
The Argentinean labour market is clearly a dual market: half is formal and half informal.
On the one hand, the formally employed are made up of 30% of formal private wage earners and 20% of public employees.
🔹 On the other side, 25% of unregistered wage earners and another 25% of self-employed (half of whom pay the Monotributo and the other half not even that).
👎🏼 The lack of formal job creation is due to cyclical and structural factors. The cyclical factors include the lack of genuine economic growth since 2012. Without economic growth there can be no significant increase in employment.
✒️📜 Structural factors include the age-old and atavistic labour institutions, including the argentine collective bargaining model created by Juan D. Perón in 1950 and never modernised.
This model basically responds to three pillars:
🔺 A single union negotiates for all workers in a branch of activity.
🔺 This agreement is applicable to all employers in the branch of activity regardless of whether the signatory chambers represent all employers (automatic extension of the agreement).
🔺 Agreements never expire (ultra-activity).
👉🏼 This means that the union that negotiates has excessive power. Because what it negotiated once, it does not negotiate again (because of ultra-activity) and no employer can leave this old agreement to negotiate one of its own, at the level of its own firm with its own workers (because of the automatic extension).
This is clearly seen in the crisis in the tyre industry 🛞 and in the threats made this week by truckers 🚛.
A trade union holds hostage not only companies but society itself.
‼️ The immediate solution does not lie in labour reform, nor in ending ultra-activity, nor in ending the collective agreements already signed. The solution lies in a tool that Perón himself gave to the State to organise collective bargaining, which is the power to grant the status of signatory member of a collective agreement.
⭕️ The way out, to the tyre crisis, to what could be this week's conflict with truckers, and to the lack of formal job creation to reduce the 50% working informally, is in the hands of the Ministry of Labour.
🤝 The aim is to enable companies to sign collective bargaining agreements at firm level with the agreement of the majority of their workers.
⚠️ The current branch collective agreements are maintained. Ultra-activity is maintained. Current union leaderships are maintained. Nothing is touched in this regard.
☝🏼 But negotiation at firm level of a new collective agreement at firm level is enabled, which takes precedence over the branch agreement, as long as the workers agree. If the workers no longer agree, the branch agreement applies again by default.
When Perón did the old collective bargaining model in the 1950s.
The hypothesis was the cold war and economic and social autarchism in order to be preserved from the individualistic capitalism of the United States and the communist collectivism of the Soviet Union.
🗣💬 Perón not only said: "To govern is to create work", but he was a pragmatic guy. If he lived in this globalised world with more democratic and decentralised international value chains and society, he would mould his own collective bargaining model to move towards firm-level bargaining, even for SMEs.
Our country needs to be managed with seriousness and with a focus on important on a par with the urgent 🙌🏼.
Argentines want concrete proposals and solutions that resolve our daily lives.
Argentines want to prosper and live in peace. 🕊
🎯 For this reason, in addition to short-term solutions, we also want a short-, medium- and long-term plan for Development y Federal Growth macro micro together with State policies to be maintained whoever governs; the only way to solve our decades-old structural problems.
Citizens: let's set the agenda.
Join us!
#YoQuierounPlanparaMiPaís 🎯
#PlanCountryArgentina 💙
#SetTheAgenda 📒
#ModerniseModelCollectiveBargainingArgentina
🙏🏼 We would like to thank our partner Coconstructor IDESA for the elaboration of this text which can be read in full by clicking here. click here.
More information can be found at www.idesa.org
ℹ️ Sources and employment data used in this text are available on request from ℹ️ Sources and employment data used in this text are available on request from info@idesa.org.