more than 300 thousand COMPANIES asked the STATE for help

Minister Claudio Moroni assured that the Government could maintain the benefit of the Emergency Family Income (IFE) for a longer time and that there are already more than 300,000 companies that have registered with the AFIP to obtain state aid in the face of the unleashed economic and labor crisis following the advance of the coronavirus.

This was said in a virtual session of almost three hours before a score of legislators from the Upper House’s Labor and Social Security Commission.

“At the moment, as the AFIP people have just told me, there are almost 400,000 companies registered, so we will wait next week to have more data to establish clearly what benefits they will receive “, assured the minister.

He also referred to the difficulties in identifying the beneficiaries of the Extraordinary Family Income (IFE), which will eventually be delivered to more than seven million people, double the number originally planned.

“It is a complex universe. We have the formal workers and the sectors that receive social plans, and we have identified those two. In the middle we find the informal ones who do not receive plans, those who are sometimes formal and sometimes informal. We have pretty little interaction with that universe, “he remarked.

Moroni reflected that “the IFE confronts us with the Argentine reality of having ten or twelve million people in the informal system, on the one hand, and a universe that we do not know, on the other.”

On the other hand, he avoided anticipating which will be the production areas that will come out of the mandatory quarantine, although he mentioned that the public works would be among the first.

“We must start gradually. There must be a series of conditions where this activity is carried out. The main fear of all this is not the working conditions, but the way to get to the jobs: public transport deserves main attention,” he stressed.

However, he stated that “the issue of public works is within those sectors that will be gradually rehabilitated.”

Moroni said that his portfolio will not interfere with the telework modality that many sectors are practicing during quarantine, “but rather on the type of work that the employee performs and not because of the tool that the company uses.”

“This is a waiver from attending workplaces. We appeal to contractual good faith between workers and employers,” Moroni said.

However, he acknowledged that “the ministry’s inspection capacity is quite low due to this situation,” and said that the labor portfolio “is working with 8% of its staff.”

Senator from the Frente de Todos Jorge Taiana pointed out that “state assistance is essential for the millions of Argentines who today are being affected by the economic unemployment caused by the pandemic.”

After requesting information on the situation of SMEs in Buenos Aires, the legislator mentioned that “a present State is the best way to face this crisis that we are experiencing.”

The head of the Together for Change interblock, Luis Naidenoff, remarked that The main opposition party “accompanied the decisions that were made in this context” in which, as he observed, “the essential axis is to defend life and sustain employment.”

And, he mentioned the “painful situation” of the companies, considered that “the measures that the government was taking were palliative for the situation” and claimed “policies from here to July or August for when the peak of the other flu, the seasonal”.

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