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While the Argentine government led by Mauricio Macri has said it will not hesitate to continue with massive layoffs, the Senate just passed a bill that seeks to forbid dismissals until Dec. 2017. The idea came from workers' unions, which held a meeting with several legislators in late March and started working on the draft in order to preserve jobs.
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The bill seeks to ban dismissals in both the public and the private sector and it would be retroactive from March 1, 2016, so all the workers that have been fired since that date would be reinstated. If any workers are dismissed without proper cause during that period, the employers would have to pay a severance that would be twice as much as under the current legislation. For workers with temporary conctracts that are close to expiring, they would be automatically renewed until Dec. 31, 2017.
Despite its passage in the Senate, President Macri has already said he is against it. “We should not bring to the present ideas that have failed in the past,” he said last week after Parliamentary commitees had already approved the draft in both the lower house and Senate. He also said the initiative was “arbitrary”.
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The main opposition force, the Front for Victory, said it will not accept a Macri veto of the bill once it is passed, and it said it could seek the approval of two-thirds of the Congress, to nullify the veto, Hector Recalde, leader of the FpV legislators in the lower house told teleSUR.
The bill is supported by the five umbrella unions of Argentina, the three variants of the peronist General Confederation of Labor and two of the more left-leaning Workers Central of Argentina.
Asked about the possibility of Macri vetoing the anti-layoffs bill, the head of the CTA, Hugo Yasky told teleSUR they would not let Macri get away with it. “We at the CTA believe the answer should be to take to the streets. All five workers’ centrals should go on a general strike and call for a massive mobilization, because if the bill is passed and then vetoed, it would be a denial of the right to demand a law against layoffs that would be legitimately approved and it would also deny the Congress the ability to correct or change some of the terrible policies that are carried out by the executive branch.”.
The question is whether or not Macri is willing to pay the political cost of vetoing the anti-layoffs bill in a context in which the employment rate has become one of the main concerns in Argentina.
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