Montevideo. The Uruguayan trade union confederation PIT-CNT has led mass protests against a pension reform by President Luis Lacalle Pou’s government. A march last Thursday made its way to Parliament, where the reform plans were being discussed that day.
The reform will raise the retirement age “until it drops” and “lead to fewer rights and fewer pensions for large sections of the working population,” said the union’s chairman, Marcelo Abdala. It must be prevented that the draft is passed. It has already been approved by the Senate. The governing coalition is now striving for a consensus that will find a majority in parliament.
“Social security is a mechanism that protects people from the problems that the market economy cannot solve.” The social security system “is about rights, from childhood to death. It’s about family allowances, disability protection, unemployment insurance, social protection mechanisms in a society that is becoming increasingly unequal,” says Abdala.
The Uruguayan Federation of Mutual Aid Housing Cooperatives (FUCVAM) and the Union of Dockers and Allied Industries (SUPRA) stood out in Thursday’s protests.
Social organizations also commented on the reform plans. Lucía Padula, representative of the inter-union platform InterSocial, explained that “with this reform, the government continues to show that it favors the bigwigs” and wants “any crises to be paid for by workers and the most vulnerable sectors of society”. She criticized the government initiative for “lacking a gender perspective” and ignoring people with disabilities and children, noting that it “shrinks the state and its role in ensuring rights in society”.
Enrique Méndez, head of the organizational secretariat of the PIT-CNT, stressed in his speech that the reform is a “brutal synthesis” of the adjustment process carried out by the current government. The initiative came about “without the support of the people” and the mobilization shows this. He went on to say that “the entire social representation in the Social Insurance Bank was against this criminal reform” and that even the employers’ representation was against it.
The trade union confederation admits that a reform of the social system is necessary, “but it has to be done differently, with negotiations and social dialogue”.
Méndez explained that the union movement’s proposal is to reform Social Security, but that the economic contributions must come from the “most powerful sectors at the corporate level” that “have all the makings of it,” rather than “Juan Pueblo taking the money out of his pocket to pull”.
In the event of parliamentary approval of the government-sponsored project, the trade union confederation has already assured that it will continue to mobilize against it.