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After months of protests and tens of thousands of layoffs of public sector employees, Argentina workers have seen a victory as bank employees won a deal in the early hours of Friday morning to see their salaries increased and fired workers brought back to the job, local media reported.
ANALYSIS:
Argentina's Mass Layoffs by Mauricio Macri Government Top 100,000
Workers organized in the Banking Association lifted their strike after reaching an agreement for a 33 percent salary hike that will be retroactive from Jan. 1 of this year. The deal also includes “reinstatement of the unemployed,” according to a statement from the union, after a massive wave of layoffs across Argentina’s public sector.
Bank workers had planned to strike on Friday, but called off the action in light of the victory.
The Banking Association argues that the agreement should be extended to workers in the private banking sector and announced in a statement that efforts will now focus on negotiating such a deal.
Some 120,000 public and private sector workers have been fired under the President Mauricio Macri’s fierce austerity campaign in the past four months, according to the Argentine Confederation of Midsized Enterprises. At the beginning of April, Macri’s government admitted to 11,000 layoffs in the public sector alone since the the administration came to power Dec. 10.
As the country continues to feel the pinch of inflation, opposition lawmakers have proposed a bill that would prohibit layoffs until the end of 2017 or require employees to compensate workers double when they are fired in attempts to avoid increasing unemployment and poverty.
Macri has rejected the proposal as “arbitrary.”
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