Minimum wage requires maximum increase

The employment crisis, first due to the effects of the neoliberal model and the lack of effective policies due to a bad government, which, moreover, improvises, worsened alarmingly with the pandemic.

In the midst of the confinement and the three spikes of infections, around 5 million jobs were lost.

With this, inequality and poverty have increased, returning, at least, to rates of 10 years ago.

According to the same data from Dane, the economic reactivation as of September 2021, is already at the same levels as in 2019 before the pandemic, however the unemployment rate is still very high, higher than it was before the pandemic and that. that the job that has grown the most is the independent and informal one and not the formal one.

At the regional level, the report “shows that about half of the households have not been able to recover the usual level of income before the pandemic, beyond the support of governments to solve the crisis. It also evidenced an increase in labor informality and how nations like Colombia are left in terms of recovery in this item. “

“In Colombia, along with Brazil, it was also where employment fell the most in the pandemic. In the country the income levels of more than 60% of households show no signs of recovery.”

All of this is explained by the fact that the government of Iván Duque only served bankers and large national and foreign corporations, leaving the vast majority of the population to their fate. He refused, like his coalition in Congress now, to the emergency basic income and the subsidy to the payroll of MSMEs, which would have helped a real economic and employment reactivation.

An important measure to help in this difficult situation of impoverished citizens, would be to have a significant increase in the minimum wage.

In other words, the political and social situation warrants it.

First, because after the Nobel Prize in Economics this year, which maintains that raising minimum wages does not destroy jobs, contrary to the neoliberal slogan used by governments and businessmen in the last 30 years.

Second, as shown by the graphs prepared by Oscar Morillo, from the economics studies group of the National University, which advises the CUT, there is a great debt in the increases in minimum wages, since governments and businessmen have refused to Recognize that the definition of the minimum wage must take into account labor productivity and not the artificial and highly controversial formula for total factor productivity, which is always lower and in the value of inflation they have always taken into account the average and not that of poor or vulnerable income, which is always higher, since the minimum wage is for this type of income.

GRAPHICS

In the last 10 years the difference in the measurement of productivity is 12 points, which have not been recognized. And on the subject of inflation at the same time it is close to 10 points. The “little game” they do to not recognize what the worker does in their performance is gigantic.

Finally, let’s say that the new German government of socialists, liberals and greens defined a 26% increase in the minimum wage, going from 9.5 to 12 euros per hour. And in the United States, President Biden is advancing a reform to establish a minimum wage throughout the Union of $ 15 per hour, meaning in many states going from $ 8, 10 or 12 dollars an hour. A significant increase.

This is how it should be in Colombia, a significant increase.

Postscript: unionism and workers require that a person like Edwin Palma, worker and unionist from Ecopetrol and the USO, born in Barrancabermeja, worker and oil company and also a lawyer with a master’s degree in labor law, be in a prominent place on the Pact’s list Historical.