Many were surprised when, in mid-October, a report by Cuban Television attributed to low wages the exodus of qualified personnel from the electrical industry.
“Before, we were one of the companies that benefited the most in terms of salaries, and one could cover their needs. With the Ordinance we fell into a very low step, and that affects”, declared Yoandry Flores, head of the block and operator of the control room at the Antonio Guiteras thermal power plant, in Matanzas. As an alternative, the managers of the plant “seek that the same operator perform several functions,” the journalist Lázaro Manuel Alonso pointed out in the same note.
From the Ministry of Energy and Mines they argued “that electricity in Cuba has a high degree of subsidy, which does not allow the payment of attractive utilities to workers.”
It is not a new phenomenon. In September 2021, the member of the secretariat of the Central Committee of the Party Félix Duarte Ortega had come to Nuevitas to “exchange about other salary concepts” with managers of the “10 de Octubre” thermoelectric plant. “More than 3,450 workers have been removed from the National Electro-energy System since the beginning of the year [tras la aplicación del Ordenamiento Monetario]”, he revealed.
In short, 2021 closed with 6,612 casualties in the sector. During the first six months of 2022, another 5,769 resignations were recorded, detailed George Batista Pérez, general secretary of the National Union of Energy and Mining Workers. “To solve this difficulty, it would be appropriate to make a new proposal for a salary increase or look for some way that encourages the increase in remuneration […] Preparing an electrical worker who operates a plant or other such equipment takes five to eight years.”
“It is not enough to pass a course,” said an employee of one of the batteries of generator sets in the city of Camagüey. “In itself, any task in this industry has its degree of complexity, but the conditions in which the equipment is found also have an influence, with years of over-exploitation and without adequate parts or maintenance. Many problems are solved thanks to experience. For this reason, it ‘weighs’ so much when an operator with time in office leaves. And the worst thing is that almost everyone who requests leave does so to dedicate themselves to occupations in which they miss out on knowledge that would be needed here.
Most of the salaries in the electrical industry range between 4,000 and 8,000 pesos per month, although the possibility of combining several responsibilities allows a part of the workers to increase their payrolls. The possibility of supplementary payments is added, which are related to the results, efficiency and performance of the worker as a whole.
In addition, the particularities of some remuneration systems benefit specific groups, such as the brigades of the Power Plant Maintenance Company, whose payments can reach 20,000 pesos. They are the brigades that move between provinces in cases of demand for major repairs or unforeseen breakdowns, when they organize to work in shifts of twelve hours a day, or more, according to what operators of the Nuevitas thermoelectric plant told this reporter.
outstanding compensation
In August 2018, Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel was informed about a situation of “labor fluctuations, especially in key positions” at the Matanzas Fuel Trading Company.
According to the newspaper Granma, the reasons could be summed up as “insufficient salaries, failures in the quality and variety of food and complaints about the means of work”. The President had indicated that “as long as it is not possible to solve them with salary benefits, it is necessary to work on caring for men.”
Four years later, the youth of several of the managers of the entity seems to confirm that “mobility” continues to be the keynote within the staff of the main fuel terminal in the country.
Last July, during the accountability of the Ministry of Energy and Mines to the National Assembly, Diaz-Canel announced that the State budget would provide a kind of compensation to the Electric Union, so that it would increase the payments to its workers. The technological deterioration of the plants and the subsidized price of electricity affect the accounting of companies dedicated to the production and distribution of energy and, therefore, the income of essential personnel, he considered.
In October, the application of the proposal had not yet materialized, according to a report by journalist Lázaro Manuel Alonso.
Other “collateral damage” of the Ordinance
Camagüey started the school year with fewer teachers than it needs. As an alternative, the province once again appealed to the pedagogical contingents (made up of university students who alternate their own classes with those taught to younger students), to professionals from other specialties hired temporarily and to “increase the teaching load” (assign more class shifts to the remaining teachers).
The Ministry of Education is accustomed to fragmenting the statistics relative to the percentage of teaching coverage, providing partial information in each province. The practice was repeated this time. In a Round Table on the topic, issued in September, the agency estimated the number of teachers nationwide at 250,000, without detailing the deficit. But the fact that Havana needs around 3,000 teachers mobilized from other provinces implicitly confirms the complexity of the situation.
In the last decades, Camagüey only managed to cover its pedagogical needs in the 2019-2020 academic year, as a consequence of a salary increase decreed by the Government for the budgeted sector.
The average salary of teachers practically tripled, approaching 1,200 pesos per month. At the rate of the time, the sum was equivalent to about $50, or bills like those for 48 pounds of pork, or 240 pounds of rice. It was incentive enough for thousands of educators to return to the classroom or reconsider the decision to leave.
A year and a half later, within the framework of the Monetary Regulation, the payroll of the sector increased again, reached, in the case of teachers with a higher level, 5,060 pesos. But the calculations did not anticipate inflation, which has dramatically devalued the national currency. According to average prices, today for that amount of money you can buy 29 dollars, or 17 pounds of pork, or 101 pounds of rice; in other words: nominally four times as much is charged, but the purchasing power is at least half what it was before.
“This is a thankless job for many reasons that the salary does not compensate,” a teacher from Camagüey told me who, after twenty years in a primary school, has considered changing her profession. To support her reasoning, she appeals to the routine that she has lived since March, marked by blackouts of between ten and fourteen hours a day.
“Almost always I get up without light and find myself in the same situation when I return home. Even during the last few weeks, when the blackouts have been shortened. Teachers do not have the option of ‘running away’, as they do in other workplaces, and we are forced to do housework at dawn. With a salary that is not even enough to buy a rechargeable lamp”.
The money also has a determining weight in the difficulties faced by the Ministry of Public Health to renew its body of specialists. At the beginning of November, the newspaper Invasive revealed that in 2021 in Ciego de Ávila there had been 146 discharges —71 of them definitive— from the medical and stomatological residency programs. The magnitude of the data is put into context by taking into account that last year the residents in training in that province totaled 192 in total, a figure that represented 59.8% of the places that, in principle, had been put out to call.
Although the report did not delve into the subject, the readers’ comments coincided in pointing to poor working conditions and low wages as fundamental causes of the phenomenon.
When reviewing the preparations for the school year in Camagüey, the Minister of Education, Ena Elsa Velázquez, called to “provide particular attention to teachers”; Except for a certain priority in the granting of places in children’s circles, it was not clear what she was referring to. Weeks before, workers at the Antonio Guiteras thermoelectric plant had been sold induction cookers (a blessing if you think that with the current rhythms of commercialization it will take twenty years to satisfy the national demand of that article). Provinces like Camagüey have once again organized sales of rice and other deficit products to health workers. Little more.
The “point stores”, the “annual sales of electrical appliances” or the “modules with toilets and food”, which in other times benefited sectors such as agriculture, defense or construction, contributed to retaining the loyalty of the workforce in the state sector. “The salary paid more,” recalled the generator employee quoted in this article. “Those who complete a working day are at a disadvantage with the ‘coleros’ and those who don’t work, and they should have some protection,” he added.
In an economy marked by scarcity like the Cuban one, the solutions will hardly go through the increase in wages. Such a measure would only exacerbate inflation; and it would end up causing more workers to leave their —sometimes essential— jobs for less precarious occupations. Between the commitment to the profession and the daily consumer urgencies, there is little room for doubt.
