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Politics Milei faces the second general strike of the CGT in just five months of government - Infobae

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Milei faces the second general strike of the CGT in just five months of government - Infobae​


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May 09, 2024

The new Cegetista protest will be important thanks to the accession of transport, but it will become a dilemma for the dialogue union sector. Everyone looks to the day after the strike, where the militants and the left can gain positions


By Ricardo Carpena

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The CGT will carry out another general strike and the Government shows no signs of going back with its policies

4 years, 11 months, and 9 days have passed since the CGT held its last 24-hour general strike. Mauricio Macri governed and among the union demands were “the deterioration of the economic situation” and “the loss of purchasing power of salaries due to inflation.” Later, Alberto Fernández and Cristina Kirchner were much luckier: they did not suffer a single strike despite the fact that the economy, inflation and salaries worsened than the Cambiemos management left behind. Today, Javier Milei will face his second general strike since he took office , this time for 24 hours. Before, he endured a 12-hour strike with mobilization and two other protest street concentrations. Quite a record.


Will anything change the day after this Thursday's strike? This is what the labor union is betting on with a measure of force that, as expected, will be forceful thanks to the support of transportation. He already managed to get Milei to agree to cut the labor reform almost to its size and got him to make his position more flexible of not standardizing joint ventures that exceeded the inflation forecast. But he was not satisfied and now he is going for more: he wants to eliminate other articles from the Base Law, prevent the return of the Income Tax and stop the economic adjustment and the reform of the State that will reduce jobs.


“We have the responsibility to lead, but this is not the CGT of 40 years ago,” Gerardo Martínez , leader of the UOCRA and one of the most lucid leaders of unionism, told Infobae , to highlight that the time of the 13 strikes has already passed. Saúl Ubaldini's generals against Raúl Alfonsín and that the Cegetista leadership knows that "Milei presides over the country and has to govern for 4 years." To show a more reflective attitude, however, it should go beyond the usual logic, subordinated to the strikes and mobilizations that mainly punish non-Peronist governments (that characteristic had 64% of the 44 measures of force called by the CGT). since 1983, as reported by this media).

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Javier Milei will face the second general strike this Thursday since he took office last December (Photo Franco Fafasuli)

It is a problem for unionism to have been trapped in that trap. And even more so for the dialogue sector of the CGT, which runs the risk of not being able to escape the irreducible dynamics of the combative and left-wing union factions. Today, the most moderate of the CGT feel forced to toughen up to try to get the Government to call them to dialogue and, at the same time, to not be out of place in the CGT congress that will elect new authorities before the end of the year.


What will happen after the 24-hour general strike? “It will depend on the Government,” Martínez answered. It is still not clear how the dialogue faction of the CGT will do to prevent its strategy from being left at the mercy of the toughest from this Friday. Pablo Moyano raised the “ghost of Banelco” and angered related senators . Kirchnerist Edgardo Llano asked legislators who voted on the Bases Law to “crash” airline flights. The head of the combative CTA Autonomous, Hugo “Cachorro” Godoy, even went further and threatened to remove Milei by force: “The Argentine people throw out despots and dictators as we have already done throughout history” , He said.


The dilemma is how to prevent those current partners of the CGT in the plan to fight against the Government from being the ones who will set the pace of its next steps and how to make clear their deep differences with the unionists who appeal to a discourse and a line of action. action that borders on the destituent.
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Pablo Moyano, with K unionists such as Sergio Palazzo and Mario Manrique

Meanwhile, the Casa Rosada shows no signs of becoming sensitive to the CGT protests and is actually moving forward as if it were trying to expose the union leaders to a society that, according to surveys, for the most part still tolerates the consequences of the “more great of humanity”, as Milei boasted of being applied. Can the CGT continue to harden and carry out permanent strikes without becoming associated with the attempt to overthrow the President?

That is why the CGT's commitment to do everything possible so that the Senate rejects the Base Law and the fiscal package is understood: if the Government fails to have these key laws, the defeat will be so great that, the CGT imagines, it will have to recalculate its decisions. and sit down to negotiate. Which is what happened with the university march, a tremendous political miscalculation by the ruling party. After the massive mobilization, even filled with Milei voters, the Government called the UBA authorities and this Monday even the Minister of Human Capital, Sandra Pettovello, received the 4 unions of the education sector at the CGT and promised them the that he had been denying them: convene the national teachers' joint meeting shortly. Will the same thing happen if Milei does not get the laws he needs out of Congress?

The board on which the Government and the CGT move is very similar to that of chess. He who rushes and does not think about the next move loses. This is what they admit in the dialogue-oriented union sector, where they know that they should not give up the leading role in the hands of Pablo Moyano, Edgardo Llano and Hugo Godoy.

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Moyanism will attack Sergio Sasia in the Confederation of Transport Workers (CATT)

There are inevitable conflicts: after this Thursday's strike, the leader of the Truckers' Union will try to displace the railway worker Sergio Sasia from the leadership of the Argentine Confederation of Transport Workers (CATT). The crisis became evident last Monday, when the sector's unions held meetings from 8 to 11 with interruption of service, but Sasia and 2 railway unions differentiated themselves by not paralyzing the trains and limiting themselves to distributing leaflets with their demands.

This Wednesday, for the first time after long years of fierce internal rivalry, the Kirchnerist Capital section of the Association of State Workers (ATE), led by Daniel Catalano, allied itself with the Union of Civil Personnel of the Nation (UPCN), of a moderate imprint and led by Andrés Rodríguez, to disseminate a document in which they denounce “the attempt to dismantle the national State” and speak of a “manhunt” against public employees. Rodríguez, deputy secretary of the CGT, is a champion of dialogue and aspired to find officials with whom to negotiate measures that seem inevitable. He did not succeed and had to approach Kirchnerism.

That may be the mirror that reflects the image of other unionists with a moderate imprint who want to negotiate, but must toughen up due to the lack of new signals from the Government. That is why the conflict with unionism depends so much on the President. If he “helps” the dialogueists by calling them to agree on some measures, he will manage to isolate the leaders who only seek to wear down his figure and use the CGT as a figurehead. The general strike is a form of relief and a call for attention that will last 24 hours. If the unionists want to overcome the “syndrome of the 13 strikes against Alfonsín” they will have to find different methods. Nobody makes bets on what can happen from tomorrow in this scenario in which Milei and the CGT are the axes of an indecipherable fight.
 
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