The Secretary of the Presidency, Álvaro Delgado, and the Minister of Labor and Social Security, Pablo Mieres, participated this Sunday, together with the Minister of the Environment, Adrián Peña, in the act summoned by the PIT-CNT for the Workers’ Day, which was held again in the streets after two years of pandemic.
The leaders attended the area of Libertador and Valparaíso around 11 am, where the leaders of the trade union center emphasized questioning the “late” and “insufficient” measures by the government and pointed to the loss of real wages and the increase Of the prices.
Delgado, who sat next to Mieres to listen, told the press that the government spent two years “very conditioned” by the evolution of the coronavirus pandemic and attributed the “effect” of the price increase to the war between Ukraine and Russia. and inflation in the country.
“Here there is a commitment that the government assumed and that is that people do not lose real wages,” he said, in response to the claims. “The government decided to bring forward the recovery due to inflation because otherwise there would be a loss of real wages,” she insisted.
Later, he was consulted about the messages sent from the PIT-CNT during the oratory of the act, among them that of the Secretary of Human Rights, Fernanda Aguirre, who provoked the booing of the public towards Minister Mieres: “There were several speeches. ( …) Some (were) about the rhetoric of exclusionary development projects, which are very ideological. There are very political parts of it.”
Regarding the speech of the leader of the gastronomic union, he specified: “When one has such an ideological aspect and everything goes through the same sieve, talking about Yankee anti-capitalism (…) and conditioning that the United States is almost ruling Uruguay… I leave it for there, I prefer to try to rescue the positive. Obviously, I do not share anything. From the first to the last sentence I do not share anything. It is a tremendously ideological and very sixties speech.”
“The PIT-CNT has lately changed in that consideration of having a much more political discourse than it had before. Abdala’s speech focused on some proposals that, at least, are acceptable to write down and study. For me, It was positively based on something that is very important, which is the issue of employment. Then they began to oppose things that have not yet been resolved, for example, the social security reform law,” said the secretary.
For his part, Mieres referred to his participation in the event on his Twitter account: “We are attending the PIT-CNT event because beyond the enormous distances we have with their positions, we must maintain dialogue and respect for the everyone’s opinions.
The minister, who was whistled after the mention of Aguirre, stated: “One feels that one should be there because it is important to listen to all the voices of society. Undoubtedly, the union movement expresses part of the opinion of the citizens. As a minister of Labor, in particular I go to other events organized by business chambers and, of course, I thought I had to be here today; obviously I do not share many things”.
“The government has a firm commitment to recovering the purchasing power of wages. You always have to study all the proposals, but the dialogue with the union movement has been there from the beginning,” he added.
Aguirre had questioned it by recreating an alleged conversation between the two: “Here the minister present told us in the Superior Tripartite Council: ‘Yes, Fernanda, they lost (real salary) and they are going to lose again because that is how we determined it.’ It happened and we say it to your face because those conditions are imposed on us in the Salary Councils”.
“They throw alms at us that they put as adjustments when they are not fulfilling the promises that we were going to be recovering what was lost,” he said.
