Aeronautics Open Dialogue to Avoid Crisis in Argentina Before October Elections

The aeronautical unions opened an instance of political negotiation yesterday to avoid a conflict with the adoption of force measures before the elections.They did it through the Vice Minister of Production and Labor, Lucas Aparicio, who went to the sustained delay in the definition of the joint venture in Aerolineas Argentinas and the crisis in several of the airlines that operate in Argentina.

The dialogue channel sought to skip the Minister of Transportation, Guillermo Dietrich, whom they syndicate as the greatest enemy within the national Cabinet.

The instance inaugurated by Aparicio, in fact, postponed the call for direct action measures that the unions planned to carry out if they did not obtain answers in the short term.The secretary of Labor and junior of Dante Sica pledged to analyze all the claims and answer them in a short time, although in the case of Aerolineas Argentinas he was subject to a context of budgetary restrictions of the company and the national State.
The meeting included several of the main referents of the sector: Pablo Biró, head of the Airline Pilots Association (APLA), Ricardo Cirielli, of the technical staff (APTA), Rubén Fernández (UPSA, hierarchical), Cristian Erhardt (commanders Austral) and a representative of APA, the union of counter employees and majority in the activity.In January the same trade unionists had obtained other Aparicio commitments that avoided a national strike with the repeal of several regulations that had generated resistance.

The central axis of the meeting was the lack of definition in the salary negotiation in the flag airline. The authorities of Aerolineas Argentinas and Austral have so far agreed to pay temporary increases that covered the period from October 2018 to last April but avoided discussing a percentage increase for the year of validity of the joint venture.

In the unions they claimed that the workers have kept their wages unchanged since last April, with a lag that they calculated not less than 20 percentage points.

“We clearly interpret that there is vocation of Minister Dietrich to force a conflict and give it a political and electoral use. Dietrich’s famous aircraft revolution is a failure that hurt companies, as we had announced.

Today they are all in crisis, from Airlines to Flybondi, Norwegian and Avian,” Biró summarized this newspaper.

The leader, however, appreciated the opening of a parallel instance of negotiations with the Secretary of Labor.

After highlighting the six-month delay in the discussion at Aerolineas and Austral, the unions demanded from the official a solution for the Avian workers, a successor of MacAir (airline company of the Macri family) that for five months have not charged their salaries.

They also ratified the opposition of the unions to the deregulation of the ramp service with the consequent damage to the state Intercargo.

The root of that claim was the signing, weeks ago, of an agreement between Argentina (Dietrich did it) with the United States to guarantee a mechanism of “open skies” between both countries.

According to a statement, the leaders asked Aparicio for his intervention.

“in order to roll back the Inter Change measures for the Lan Argentina company, allowing planes with foreign license plates (in this case, Chilean) to operate in the domestic market, such as the authorization to the Tam company to carry out the San Pablo-Córdoba-Falkland Islands flight, where a foreign company is illegally allowed to operate on domestic flights with the aggravating contempt towards our Falkland Islands with all that this means for the feeling national”.

 

Source: Ambito