The Union of Tourism, Hotel and Food Service Workers of Argentina (UTHGRA) has successfully closed the wage negotiations it was conducting with the industry’s various employers. SIREL spoke with this union’s leader and president of the IUF’s HRCT Group, Norberto Latorre, who gave us a detailed account of the results of last week’s agreements.
 

-An agreement has finally been reached with management…

-We have just signed the Wage Agreement with the most important Business Chamber, which groups 90 percent of the industry’s operators, that is, bars, restaurants and one to four star hotels. In this sector, we’ve achieved a 30 percent wage increase, which this time, as opposed to what had happened in previous years, is a raise in remuneration, which means that it is incorporated to the base salary, thus increasing all additional benefits. This raise will be implemented gradually, in three parts: May, June, and July, bringing us to August with the full increase incorporated. During the bargaining process, employers acknowledged the real inflation figures, which are different from those disclosed by the Government, and which have affected the workers’ incomes.

-Was the bargaining process easy?

-We encountered some difficulties, because it is a nationwide activity and at the meetings there is one representative per area. We also had to discuss the particularities of each region, which vary enormously due to differences in climate, population, quality of the facilities, and tourist flow. This increase applies to everyone, and then there are specific increases. For example, in a couple of months the south of the country will be in high season, and Bariloche, for instance, will have an additional 25 percent because it is in a cold area, plus 28 percent more on account of the high season, that means that as of July and until the end of the season the area will see 53 percent above the income for the rest of the country.

-What was the outcome of the bargaining in the five-star hotels and chains?

-There we agreed on a 25 percent increase for base salaries, plus an additional 8 percent for tourism, as a way of obtaining a greater increase, which means that this additional percentage will be permanent.

-How many people are covered by this Agreement?

-Approximately 200 thousand workers. That’s 90 percent of all the workers we represent, as we are still negotiating with the Chamber of Catering Services and the chamber that represents the by-the-hour hotels.

-Is Argentina’s tourism industry still growing?

-The four and five star hotels are working at virtually full occupancy. Luckily, we can say that the industry’s growth is sustained. That is why we’re even more motivated to maintain and step up our struggle against the false half-workday, which is just a way for employers to under-declare their staff, thus cheating them out of their benefits, in addition to committing tax fraud and denying resources to our health care service on which our members and their families rely on for medical care. It also entails an evasion with respect to the union itself. We’re fighting this battle on every front, conducting inspections in the companies, and holding ‘escraches’ [protests in the form of public exposures] against the evaders. We’ve signed an agreement with employers on this issue. Under this agreement workers have the obligation to report to the union the number of employees hired under such schemes. They can do this by simply filling out a form on our web page, and then we verify the information through an inspection if the statements have any bearing with reality.

-Can you as a union conduct such inspections, or must you be accompanied by the Ministry of Labor?

-Both are possible. The union inspection is done by mutual agreement, but if the company refuses we can file a request with the Ministry and that’s usually not good for employers. Most don’t refuse, and they also give us access to documentation. And when they do refuse, by law we have a lot of alternatives we can pursue to attain our goal, even the possibility of resorting to police force.

This is going to be our toughest battle, tougher even than the wage bargaining process, because often after a raise is obtained companies use this type of procedures, along with fully undeclared labor, to maintain their profits. We’ve been increasingly gaining ground, and we’re going to continue fighting. This system of mandatory reporting makes sectional leaders more responsible, because if they don’t comply they are subject to union penalties, and this is a strategy approved by a plenary meeting of general secretaries on a national level.

-You’re currently chairing the HRCT Group for all of the IUF. What are the main challenges that this sector is facing globally?

-In the last Conference of the HRCT Group held in Segovia, Spain, in which Gerardo Iglesias participated as the IUF’s regional secretary for Latin America, and to which we invited fellow unionists from Mexico and Venezuela, we saw that all the organizations there truly wanted to cooperate in the struggle for these same issues, because the owners of the chains and major hotels are getting richer and richer by the day while workers are becoming increasingly poorer, suffering under increasingly poor working conditions, diminishing wages, gender discrimination, etc. There in Segovia, a monitoring group for the hotel, catering and part of the tourism sectors was formed for the first time. The group is scheduled to meet in Geneva next June, with the aim of devising joint strategies. For example, Mexico and Argentina, are working together through the regional office to draw up a framework Agreement for the region, to achieve equality of working conditions, to begin with, because we realize that wage situations can vary from country to country, but the work is the same everywhere. So we are starting to work on that task, and we hope to see results by next year. And more strategically, we hope that these efforts will help us even out the differences in working conditions worldwide.