Buenos Aires, November 30 (NA) — The Argentine economy is suffering from an 'industricide' that will ultimately replace industrial jobs with work in apps like Uber or Rappi, warned the general secretary of the CGT of Zárate-Campana, Carlos Gutiérrez.
'Every day a company shrinks, suspends operations, fires employees, or simply closes, but what companies have opened in these two years?' he asked.
Gutiérrez also debunked the idea of working through apps as a viable employment option. 'Now unemployment is being swept under the rug of self-employment: cars for Uber and motorcycles for Rappi. But it's a lie that that is a job, it's a kind of illusion. If you factor in car maintenance, wear and tear, what you're doing is eating away at your capital. Worse, we can't get angry at them, call them stupid,' he warned.
Gutiérrez considered it 'urgent to discuss robotization, the incorporation of AI, the drastic changes that technology imposes on the labor world.' But he clarified that it is 'not to oppose it, but to find the smartest integration from the workers' perspective. I observe that we have shirked that obligation, and that explains, at least in part, why there are young people who work in a factory but vote for Milei and celebrate imports,' he said. 'We cannot continue to ignore that reality. On top of that, working twelve hours a day or more. There are always options. Aren't those guys in their twenties telling us something?'
He noted that more than half of the machines in the sector are either shut down or operating at half capacity. Gutiérrez, who is also vying for the national leadership of his union, the Association of Supervisors of the Argentine Metallurgical Industry (ASIMRA), is a social psychologist and a mid-level manager at Toyota, where the Hilux pickup is produced.
'They can call the economic program whatever they want, but we call it indusrtricide, a continuation of the policies of Martínez de Hoz and Cavallo, which means the loss of productive capacity and the social capital accumulated by generations of Argentines,' he stated.
Gutiérrez also criticized a sector of the labor movement, in particular Luis García Ortiz, who has led ASIMRA nationally for forty years and with whom he has a legal conflict over 'clean elections.' 'Unions have always had, in addition to the responsibility of negotiating wages, the duty to create national and class consciousness.'
