Argentina on Wednesday said that it had cut 15,000 state jobs as part of Argentine President Javier Milei’s campaign to slash spending.
Presidential spokesman Manuel Adorni announced the job cuts at a news conference, portraying them as key to Milei’s promised shake-up of Argentina’s bloated public sector.
“It’s part of the work we are doing to reduce state expenses,” Adorni told reporters, describing the dismissed workers as a drag on taxpayers.
Photo: AP
“They perhaps did not have a very defined job,” he said.
Hundreds of employees — some notified of their termination last week and others before that — on Wednesday stormed their workplaces in Buenos Aires and nearby cities, beating drums, decrying their dismissal as unjust and demanding their reinstatement.
People wearing the green T-shirts of the country’s biggest union, the Association of State Workers (ATE), swelled outside national ministries. In some cases, scuffles erupted as police struggled to evict protesters from government buildings.
Workers at ministries that Mileli has vowed to close, such as the Argentine National Institute Against Discrimination, along with a range of state agencies — including the ministries for the economy, energy and social security — received the latest layoff notices.
“These layoffs have a face, they have a family, they have real needs in this context of great change and great poverty in Argentina,” ATE executive Mercedes Cabezas told reporters outside the Argentine Ministry of Labor as protesters pumped their fists and chanted around her.
“The impact runs very deep, because it’s combined with the reduction of social programs, so what we end up with is increasing poverty,” Cabezas said.
Milei campaigned for president while brandishing a chainsaw — promising to fix Argentina’s long-troubled economy by chopping down the size of the state.
Determined to balance the country’s budget, he has slashed energy and transportation subsidies, halted public works, cut payments to provincial governments and devalued the peso by more than 50 percent to close the gap between the official exchange rate and the black market rate.
Argentina’s trade unions pledged a mass general strike.
Fired workers vowed to keep showing up at their offices.
“We will continue mobilizing” Cabezas said. “Our fight is just starting.”
The confrontation might derail Milei’s push to achieve a zero budget deficit by the end of the year, experts said.
“They are walking a very thin line,” said Martin Planes from Cefeidas, a Buenos Aires-based political advisory group. “They need to go deeper with their measures to cut spending, but they need to prevent social unrest.”
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