12-hour days for slave labor

This festival of reforms, sponsored by the national government, commemorates major surgical procedures without anesthesia in the best Menemist style Deletion of 9 articles and amendment of 55 Article of the current employment contract law.
In order to avoid the encyclopedic tone that an analysis of this proposed reform requires, I have chosen on this occasion to focus on the lengthening of the working day.

It seems to be a lie, but in the year 1593He King of Spain Philip II stated “that workers work no more than 8 hours a day, divided into 4 hours in the morning and 4 hours in the afternoon, so that the sun does not punish those who work so much.” The same king granted, for the first time, ten days of paid leave per year and up to half of their salary to workers who were recovering in some form due to illness or accident.

In 1817, Robert Owen, a Welsh businessman, philanthropist and socialist theorist, introduced a compulsory working day in his factories, not to exceed eight hours a day. In 1866, the Socialist International introduced the 8-hour working day.

“That the workers work not more than 8 hours a day, divided into 4 hours in the morning and 4 hours in the afternoon, so that the sun does not punish those who work so much” (King Philip II, 1593)”

Andrew Johnson, President of the United States in 1868, passed the law that established an 8-hour workday for federal employees and public works workers, but did not include industrial workers. This exclusion fueled the strikes of 1886, including the one in Chicago that led to the Haymarket Massacre, a pivotal event in the fight for labor rights and the origin of Labor Day.

Today, in current Argentina, where 7.6% of the unemployed are registered, there are 12 million non-union workers and not even 3 million union workers. It is clear that the government is trying to drastically reduce this last number so that they are not looking for better conditions at all.

The reality is that the project that the Executive wants to present does not take into account the enormous sacrifices made by workers, victims of the policies of incompetent governments of all stripes that have left the poor in misery.

It is a reform that focuses only on labor costs and does not take into account the exorbitant corporate profits that they have accumulated despite the existing law being questioned. As far as we know, this law has not resulted in businessmen replacing the poor, nor has the poor and white-collar workers replaced the rich.

The Labor Minister confirmed that the labor reform will only apply to new jobs

Apart from the articles to be amended and deleted, it is worrying to observe how the speeches that establish it as an inevitable duty of defense not to lose the rights acquired through the sacrifices and struggle of yesterday’s workers and organizations, which no one has done yet, are taken into account.

This is happening in the world of the formalized, which violently collides with the other part of the world of workers, called “informal,” a legion of those excluded and marginalized by the current labor system. These people are used to moving outside the ART, pension contributions and without social work, but who form an economic unit that mobilizes a large part of the country.

Today 7.6% are unemployed in Argentina; “The number of non-union workers is 12 million”

This reform is more embarrassingly regressive than the law mentioned above Philip II from more than 400 years ago. This contradicts most civilized countries, where the trend is to shorten the working day without reducing wages and which tend to regulate platform workers to give them access to social security and protection.

What this project hides is the extension of the working day, it eliminates the overtime regulation and puts the worker in the figure of a beggar who has to beg the employer and show him that he deserves a day of rest for the overtime that he was not paid as an extra and that he worked.

workers In this new world, say goodbye to being able to organize to be able to study, to be able to spend time with your family, and prepare to continue supporting this onslaught of the powerful who will continue to deepen the gap between those who consciously know that they are workers and dependent on one Salaryand those who, as equal employees, will continue to feel like entrepreneurs.

As long as these two worlds continue to collide and workers’ unity is not achieved, the festival of laws against their interests will continue to thrive.

*General Secretary of the Municipal Workers’ Union of Vicente López