Battle over university budget This is leading to a new federal march after days of strikes that has received very high levels of support over the past two weeks. Towards this end, strategic steps have been taken which include: A call to the Plaza de los Dos Congresos demanding the Senate approve the University Financing Law Which received half the approval in the deputies. If it succeeds, and it is likely it will, it will be vetoed by the executive, the teaching and non-teaching unions, the students and the body of rectors gathered in the National Interuniversity Council (CIN). They could hold a march in September that would replicate the massive and powerful mobilisation of April.
That historic march not only defined “The value of the university as an institution”Carlos de Feo, general secretary of the Federation of University Teachers (Conadu), says. “It starts with a union issue, because they pay us too little, and ends up as a broader claim,” he describes. It’s that “behind the university claim there are other claims, because people experience it as a place to express themselves, and this confirms the credibility of the public university in our country.”
Today, with the aim of saving the public vocational training system from the abyss to which the government of Xavier Meili denounces, visibility activities are organized: hugs, flag-waving and debates, which will take place in the coming days in 60 universities in the country. The activities in the faculties where elections are to be held will further fuel the debate within the monasteries.
Meanwhile, the government adjusts and adds incentives: four days ago the option to submit research projects was canceled. The fatal announcement was made clear by Alicia Caballero, head of the Financing Agency of the disgraced Ministry of Science and Technology, explains Ana Arias, dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences at the UBA: “a fact that shows that, in reality, this government’s goal is to make our scientific and technological system disappear, and that the universities are at the center of this system.”
In this scenario of conflict and struggle, the conviction to save the university system from financial sinking emerges. The new march organized by the Union Front of Teachers and Non-Teachers is pointed out. And the involvement of the CIN, whose meeting on August 30 in La Pampa is considered as the organic beginning of the protest, given that, if the funding law is approved in the Senate, it will be vetoed.
“Meetings have already begun with student groups from different political areas,” explains Pablo Perazzi, general secretary of the Federation of University Teachers of the UBA (Feduba). Also, meetings are progressing with a block of senators “from some sectors of radicalism and Peronism,” confirms the teaching leader. “And the trade union front decided to participate in Congress this week because on Thursday the Senate will discuss the budget extension law. The mandate is to set up an open radio station in the square where the workers join with the students to demand the Senate to vote on it, knowing that Miley is going to veto it,” explains Perazzi.
The fact is that in Miley’s declared “zero deficit”, the university budget becomes a major expense: only the “decent salaries” for teachers and non-teachers, as well as what the rest of the discredited state employees should earn, are eliminated. Maya. The university sector anticipates that all laws signed by the “fiscal degenerates” will have a presidential veto.
“We are in a complicated moment, because part of society believes that the conflict was resolved after the beautiful March in April. And the only thing that was resolved was part of the operating expenses, the basics. But more than 90 percent, that is, salaries, were delayed. We lost 40 percent of our salaries and nobody noticed it,” explains Arias.
The march managed to improve operating expenses “but salaries are deteriorating and when you lose teachers because it is not convenient for them to teach, you attack the heart of the scientific and technological system,” Arias emphasizes. “And the problem of the Union becomes the problem of a country that loses scientific sovereignty and the possibility of training professionals for the problems of society, this is very serious.”
“The government tried to fix the budgetary issue, but it only sent money for gas and electricity – Di Feo is ironic – but it doesn’t work with only electricity and gas, a lot more budget is needed and it’s not there.” Today, the complaints are the same as they were in April: the budget is reduced and not updated; teachers and non-teachers’ salaries are pending; lack of scholarships and student aid; more funding is needed for science and technology and infrastructure work.
For De Feo, it was “a regional union issue. Today they are decisions that express a country model: it depends where and how these decisions are made. If Congress votes on laws that the president does not like and vetoes them, we live in a dictatorship. But we are seeing the SIDE or retirement issue as a cycle in dynamics as politics unfolds to face the decisions of the national government.
According to De Feo’s review, this wage claim began on December 20, after the massive devaluation. “We’ve had meetings, all of them frustrating, and every time we express our disagreement they come up with a worse announcement. A few days ago they called us to a joint meeting and offered a 3 percent increase in August and a 2 percent increase in September. A joke. When someone expresses that it’s not enough, people leave the meetings and remove them by decree,” he explains.
Paying great attention to Miley’s decision to call a new university march, the Konadu secretary general affirmed: “We will act based on what the president does. And I don’t think he will hesitate to veto the extension of the university budget, because that also implies revisiting this messianic policy of his with the issue of zero deficit.”
The background is a fee-paying university. For Arias, “in the face of enormous productive problems and growing poverty, we must think about public policies to be able to solve them. “They do not believe in public policies, because they disbelieve in planning development, in caring for the most vulnerable, in the possibility of collectivism.”
“That’s why they are strangling the university financially and in terms of salaries, because business pays you until you can’t pay,” says DeFeo. “And it also becomes a national fight for another country’s model. We can’t lay down our arms because that would be the destruction of the public university and that’s what they’re looking for.”