Jobs in the IT sector grew by 44.5% from 2017 to 2022, according to data published by the IT Work Observatory of the Computer Trade Association (AGC).
This entity presented this week the Computer Work Observatory (OTI) at the Kirchner Cultural Center (CCK), through which they released a detailed report on the productive sector of Software and Computer Services (SSI).
The first union observatory on computer work It intends to “make one more contribution from the point of view of the workers”, highlighted its director, Esteban Sargiotto, who drew up an analysis of the laws that regulate and promote the activity such as the Software Promotion Law (LPS) and the Economy Law of Knowledge (LEC).
According to the data published in the 2022 Annual Report “An X-ray of the Software and Computer Services (SSI) sector from the perspective of workers”, the Argentine computer industry employs, by 2022, more than 142,826 workers, mostly in a dependency relationship, and this meant a growth of 44.5% from January 2017 to December 2022.
However, they stressed that despite being a sector that is growing steadily in terms of employment and receives all kinds of aid, it pays, at the same time, poor wages.
You can see more about the @observatory_TI and download the full report here ?
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— AGC – Computer Workers (@AGCArgentina) January 26, 2023
“We find ourselves with a certain mythology that exists about the computer industry, a certain idea that one enters a course of two or three weeks or three months, and that one enters and earns 500,000 or 800,000 pesos. It’s a very confusing thing. And we said what is happening? We already knew that this was not the case, because we are a union and we are aware of the situation of the workers”, expressed Sargiotto during the presentation of the report.
In this framework, they argue that The variation of the IT salary in Argentina reflects a sustained drop over the years and, for the period 1998-2014, a loss of 20% was recorded. Meanwhile, for the 2017-2022 period, this historical trend of progressive loss of purchasing power continues.
“We find ourselves with a certain mythology that exists about the computer industry, a certain idea that one enters a course of two or three weeks or three months, and that one enters and earns 500,000 or 800,000 pesos. It’s a very confusing thing. And we said what is happening? We already knew that this was not the case, because we are a union and we are aware of the situation of the workers”Stephen Sargiotto
“This imbalance is emphasized by the current scenario of an IT industry in full growth, whose billing levels and tax incentives do not result in better salary conditions for its workers,” they stated in the report.
On the other hand, the Observatory highlighted that the Promotion Regime established by the Knowledge Economy Law reached 628 companies“most of them large, very large and some medium”.
Based on requests for reports from the Executive Branch, Sargiotto indicated that the report highlights “the amount of subsidies that (companies) received, which only the Knowledge Economy Law, in two years, was 42 billion pesos ”.
“This highlights the extremely important role that the Argentine State has had, always so bastardized and always pointed out as an agent of underdevelopment, as in this case it did not have the opposite. As the Argentine State has been extremely investor in this, “said Sargiotto, in dialogue with Télam.
In this way, they remarked that the promotion regime basically benefited four companies: Mercado Libre, Globant, Accenture and Red Link were the main recipients of the previous regime (LPS): until 2019 they received 45.9% of all benefits and only Mercado Libre took approximately 20% of those resources, they highlighted.
“In our view, although there have been improvements in the LEC and we believe that there were some positive developments because smaller companies were included in the new regime, in some way, a concentration logic continues to be maintained that we believe is towards where it should be improved,” Sargiotto said.
In this sense, he added: “If the idea is for it to be a promotion regime and the vast majority are micro and small companies, it should target micro and small companies and not the mega-large ones, which are only 3% of all companies. computer companies”.
For his part, the general secretary of AGC, Ezequiel Tosco, said that the Observatory is “an initial step”, and affirmed that “we need all four legs sitting down: universities, workers, the State and the Academy. With all these legs, it seems to me that we can better define what data we need, where we are headed, how to be more efficient in the construction of this data and then make the best political decisions”.
The presentation panel was moderated by AGC’s Undersecretary of the AGC Union, Manuel Alonso; the director of the OTI, Esteban Sargiotto; the Secretary of Innovation and Future of Work of the CGT, Vanesa Núñez, and the Vice Dean of the Faculty of Exact Sciences of Unicen, Claudio Aciti, together with the General Secretary of the AGC, Ezequiel Tosco.
