The Argentine president, Javier Milei, advanced one of the central promises of his campaign, the reduction of the structure of the State: some 7,000 public officials with recent contracts will be left out, but the government is preparing new measures to increase that number.
“The hiring of people who have begun to provide services as of January 1, 2023 (…) will not be renewed,” says a decree signed by Milei on Tuesday night.
In Argentina, it is very common for thousands of people hired due to political affinity to be incorporated into a “permanent staff” in the final stretch of a government.
But in addition to those incorporated permanently, the Argentine State has used the modality of hiring self-employed employees who charge for their services but carry out, in practice, permanent tasks in the public administration.
“For now it is unknown what will happen to the more than 45,000 employees hired by the State who have been working for more than twelve months in the national public administration, an informality that has sprung up in every corner of the State for more than a decade. In principle Their contract will be renewed for 90 days while the government moves forward with its audit and defines whether they are positions that will be maintained in the new organizational chart,” Clarín said.
“The government assured that the decree exempted workers hired in the last year who, by law, complete the trans and disabled quota,” added the newspaper with the largest circulation in the country.
The size and inefficiency of the State, which in the twenty years of Kirchnerist hegemony doubled its weight, from 21% to 41% of the GDP, is, for Milei, one of the reasons for the country’s permanent economic crisis. “The State is the problem, not the solution,” insists the ultraliberal.
Kirchnerism, on the other hand, has always championed the “present State”, a notion that permeates broad social sectors. With the liberal wave that shakes Argentine politics, that preeminence of the State is threatened for the first time in the modern economic history of Argentina. The Argentine public sector employs 3.4 million people out of a total of 46 million inhabitants.
Milei campaigned with an insistent phrase: “This time, politics will pay for the adjustment.” And although the reduction of senior positions – the Ministries went from 19 to nine – and public employees is well received by large sectors of the population, the first days of government made it clear that the true adjustment is based on more taxes for the classes averages and a notable liquefaction of State liabilities based on inflation that could reach 30% monthly in December.
