The Chief of Staff, Guillermo Francos, stated today that there is a “campaign” seeking to undermine the labor reform promoted by the government, and as an example, he said that the possibility of extending the workday to 12 hours “is madness.”
“There is a campaign about this that has no basis; the idea of a 12 or 13-hour workday is madness. It is a way to derail a reform proposal that, of course, contains nothing of that sort,” Francos expressed in an interview with Radio Rivadavia.
The Chief of Staff stated that “one should not derail a reform opportunity by creating myths and beliefs that it is being done to take away workers' rights. Not at all. It is being done to regulate labor relations and give entrepreneurs the possibility to invest and create new jobs.”
The official asserted that the reform that will be pushed by the Executive Branch seeks “to generate more competitiveness for the business sector without removing rights, and to try to make labor relations easier.”
By way of example, he criticized the ultra-activity of collective labor agreements, which establishes an automatic extension of the labor conditions of an expired agreement until a new one is negotiated and signed.
“There are some agreements that are 50 years old, and clearly the labor relationship has changed completely. So, the goal is to move to a system that allows for the decision on a work agreement at the lowest level and to change the labor relationship from the lowest to the highest,” he explained.
Francos maintained that in labor discussions, “the relationship in a large company, such as a steel mill, is totally different from what a workshop far from the country's center has, which hires a worker and cannot in any way meet that condition. That needs to be modified,” he emphasized.
