Despite massive teachers' union march in Argentina, Macri rejects collective bargaining talks

Hundreds of thousands of teachers from all over the country took to the streets of Buenos Aires yesterday, demanding that the government hold wage negotiations at a national level.

The nation's six teachers' unions, which together represent over 500,000 teachers at the primary and secondary levels, are demanding wage increases of close to 30% following a 45% jump in prices within a year after President Mauricio Macri's narrow runoff win in November 2015.

The Macri administration, which held successful collective bargaining talks last year, has refused to hold them this year. They argue that because teachers’ minimum wages were raised last year by 35% and because extra funds were earmarked to the nation's 23 provinces to pay for wage hikes, each province has to deal with its own teachers.

Most provinces, however, are currently strapped for cash amid the most serious recession since 2009, and have offered wage hikes averaging 15%. The six provinces that have reached an agreement with the unions are raising wages by an average of 25%.

The federal education budget for FY2017 was raised by 17%; inflation so far this year in Argentina, however, has been running at an annualized rate of 30%.

President Macri himself, who attended elite private schools and as Buenos Aires mayor had a record of underspending his own public education budgets by 30% or more while doting subsidies on private and parochial schools, inadvertently exacerbated tensions with teachers by describing education in Argentina as having “a terrible inequity between those who can go to private school and those who have to ‘fall’ into public education.”

The city's leading news daily Clarín, which supports the conservative Macri, went further, publishing an article on March 18 making an apocryphal comparison between a second-grader in a private school (a blonde boy) and a public school student (a darker-skinned boy) who was “falling behind.” The article was widely condemned by both teachers' unions and children's rights activists.

“These people behind us - the President, the Education Minister - have insulted us all,” said CTERA union leader Sonia Alesso. “They've insulted both teachers and students, because none of us ‘fell’ into a public school.”

At: http://www.thebubble.com/despite-massive-teachers-unions-march-national-government-wont-hold-national-wage-negotiations/

[center]

Falling in against Macri's public education budget cuts, Argentina's teachers' unions rally in Buenos Aires.