Every year from around Christmas through to February, Argentina is wrapped in a summer trance. The usual, frenzied pitch of city centres is muffled as if by vast blankets of cotton and sticky heat. Families find reprieve from work by travelling to the coast and mountains, visiting distant family and towns in the interior.
This lull often translates into a dialling-down of class struggle. There are fewer and smaller mobilisations, strikes and political activism.
On the other hand, new governments have historically exploited the summer slumber to push through policies likely to meet with popular resistance. The new right-wing government under President Mauricio Macri has proven itself to be no exception.
Austerity
In the weeks since Macri's December 10 inauguration, the new president has begun to carry out what was foreshadowed in the electoral race. The executive office has churned out an unprecedented number of “Decrees of Necessity and Urgency”, a mechanism similar to executive actions in the United States.
Not to be bothered with keeping up appearances, Macri has bypassed parliament and all other state institutions to ensure his austerity program. These strong-arm executive measures have so far taken the form of peso devaluation, a hike in energy service fees and lifting agro-export tariffs.
With his “anti-narcos” and “anti-noqui” rhetoric, Macri promised to be “tough on crime” and tough on government employees who were ostensibly lazing about, undeservingly living off the toil and taxes of the population. Noqui is a popular term for the layer of family members, friends and business associates of the political elite given positions for their connections and not required to show up to work.
To a certain extent, the concept of “noquis” stems from a general resentment of the political caste and their privileged periphery, as well as disillusionment with widespread corruption and nepotism.
Macri declared: “Kirchnerism has done the opposite of what it claimed. The city of Buenos Aires once respected and promoted careers in public service, but Kirchnerists put the state under the service of its own political interests.
“I want every Argentine to be proud of his or her job and for there to be no more collecting salaries for work that isn't done.”
Despite his moralistic strutting, Macri's wife Juliana Awada owns a number of fashion companies notorious for their sweatshop conditions.
Macri is capitalising on anti-noqui sentiment to carry out frontal attacks on workers. He has sacked government workers in droves, but not to eliminate favouritism and bribery. As pointed out in La Izquierda Diario: “The objective of the government and corporations is to advance and create conditions to impose a new leap in the level of exploitation of the working class.”
The state is taking great strides to undermine job security and bring labour under submission in order to resolve the capitalist economic crisis.
Nation-wide sackings
In a sickening, synchronised show of anti-worker rancour, Macri and his regional counterparts have together brought about a huge wave of dismissals, backed by heavy-handed repression.
More than 18,000 public sector employees nationwide have been stripped of their jobs under the pretext of “contract revision” and “downsizing the state”. These figures continue to rise.
Fifteen hundred were laid off in Posadas, 980 in Quilmes, 900 in Malvinas Argentinas, 1000 in Moron. More than 600 workers at the Nestor Kirchner Cultural Center (CCK) were barred from their workplace, told that the institution had been completely shut down.
In the city of La Plata, Mayor Julio Garro of Macri's Cambiemos coalition recently oversaw the sacking of 4500 workers. Upon hearing the news, workers protested at the city's municipal offices and were heavily repressed with tear gas and rubber bullets.
The swift and unhesitating crackdown echoed the December 22 Cresta Roja experience, in which Macri's cops beat up and destroyed the encampment of hundreds of poultry workers who had been fighting for their jobs for more than a year.
On January 11, a huge demonstration took place in La Plata. Demonstrators gathered in front of the municipal centre to reject the city government's violent crackdown on protesters in La Plata after the announcement that upwards of 4500 municipal workers would lose their jobs. The protesters demanded the workers be immediately rehired.
More than 5000 people joined from various groups including trade unions CTA, SUTEBA, and ATE, human rights group Sons and Daughters for Identity and Justice Against Oblivion and Silence, the “Multisectorial” of La Plata (broad coalition of labour, students, and civic groups), Peronist groups, populist groups, and far-left parties including the Socialist Workers Party (PTS) and Workers Party (PO) – both part of the Left and Workers' Front (FIT).
The next day, trade unionists and workers cut off highways in La Plata. The workers have not gotten an answer to their demands.
It is not clear where the chips will fall, how much the peso's devaluation will propel inflation or how many more workers will lose their job. Macri has delivered swift blows to the working class, perhaps with the idea to “hit hard, and see what comes next” to test the limits of his power and balance of forces.
He is also seeking to leave workers in worse terms to negotiate in the next industry-wide collective agreements negotiated each year to set wage hikes that keep up with inflation to a lesser or greater degree.
In response, so far the major union confederations and bureaucratic leaders are nowhere to be found. Presenting barely any resistance to the new austerity policies, they have been called out for their incipient “truce” with the Macri administration.
The new regime has begun to make its mark, but it remains unclear what the response will be from the working-class and popular sectors as a whole - including the newly unemployed, trade unions, and Kirchnerist student and workers' groups.
[Abridged from Left Voice.]
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