Uruguayans march against pension reform bill

Uruguayans march against pension reform bill

Uruguayan unions and social organizations staged a demonstration in Montevideo Thursday after joining the mobilization called on by the Plenario Intersindical de Trabajadores – Convención Nacional de Trabajadores (Inter-Union Plenary of Workers – National Workers Convention), commonly referred to as the PIT-CNT to protest against the pension reform, which has been dubbed as a “criminal” initiative from the Luis Lacalle Pou administration.

From very early in the morning, the streets were filled with colored smoke and fireworks with each union group carrying their own banners, all of which agreed on objecting to the planned reform with messages ranging from “no to this reform” to more radical “excess of oligarchy” signs, and calling for a “plebiscite to guarantee social security for the people.”

“With this reform, the government continues to show us that it favors the gold mesh” and that “it intends that all the crises should be paid by the workers and the most vulnerable sectors of society,” Intersocial’s Lucía Padula said in her speech from a stage in front of the Legislative Palace. She added that the government’s initiative lacked “a gender perspective, ignores dissidents, people with disabilities and children.”

“We are going to suffer the consequences of working for more years with a lower retirement, something that this coalition has not been able to deny. We cannot be left out, we have to know the content of this bill,” she insisted. Padula also pointed out that thousands of young people “suffer the consequences of informal jobs.”

Workers and students “demand” a social security reform “that expands” their rights and, hence, they oppose the government’s bill, which “shrinks the State and its role of guaranteeing rights to society,” she further explained. “This reform goes against the democratic values of our people, we demand that this enormous multitude of citizens be heard,” concluded the leader of one of the groups joining the PIT-CNT’s protest.

PIT-CNT’s Enrique Méndez said the intended reform was a “brutal synthesis” of the process of adjustment that “the government has been carrying out” and that “continues to hit the most vulnerable sectors of society.” The initiative never had “popular support” and Thursday’s demonstration was proof of that.

Méndez also recalled that social security “is a conquest of the working class” after fighting against “the unjust unequal conditions of the market economy”, whose only objective is to seek “indiscriminate profit” in society “without thinking about social vulnerabilities”. He assured that the weight of the reform “falls on the popular sectors of the country,” while advocating for more contributions from the “most powerful sectors at a business level” instead of “making money out of the pockets of Juan Pueblo.”

“We workers do not give up, we bet on a great social dialogue and that this discussion be postponed. But if they approve it, be very clear that it will be strongly opposed by the trade union movement and the popular movement as a whole,” he warned.