what the renewal of the Repros implies

With the objective of guaranteeing production, work and supply, the Government ordered the renewal of the Productive Recovery Program (RePro) which, in the context of the circumstances in which the entire world finds itself with the COVID 19 pandemic, It gains virtuality for any company.

The objective of the program already in force, but which will be carefully regulated again, the new prevailing circumstances of Argentine companies, is that the State subsidizes the wages of companies in critical situation.

In the next few hours, the Ministry of Labor will focus this regulation on the sectors most affected by this pandemic.

The measure will be adequate for the difficult situation that many companies are going through that have been forced to stop all their production circuits and also those that perform services and that, due to the express isolation decreed by the National Government, have had to suspend, since its staff is complying with the measure.

Keep in mind that despite the fact that many companies have adopted remote work as a premise in recent days, some of them without even having tried it before, this, in certain areas, makes it difficult to continue the production or the contracted service.

This impossibility of returning the production apparatus in general, makes it necessary to reimplement that program, now with new regulations, tending in some cases to omit requirements that, in the face of the public and a notorious state of emergency, are not revealed to be necessary. for your admissibility check.

The premise of the Ministry of Labor is to speed up responses to prevailing needs and, therefore, the reimplementation measure will come out with the idea that the most committed companies can see in this a palliative to the difficult situation.

Within the framework designed by the Government, there are two fields in which it will act; the first refers to the payment of a sum that can complete the payment of the salary that each company has agreed with its employee, up to the amount of what today results from the minimum, vital and mobile salary and, the second field, involves the decrease in a percentage to be determined, of the payment of social charges to which employers are obliged.

Both fields have a high significance in the labor cost framework of any company, since today with the inflationary system that floods us, employers have seen their earnings diminish, attentive to the increase in wages that has had to be granted in most of the cases.

Without forgetting that for any employer, the payment of social contributions (retirement, social work, family allowances, Pami and National Employment Fund) is borne by the employer and represents about twenty-three percent of the salary in question in each case.

The other side of the coin of the same problem, referred to the Crisis Preventive Procedures that some companies have used when they had to suspend personnel for a certain amount of time. In these cases, the filings before the administrative authority required attaching financial statements of the last years of the company, plus the summons of the union corresponding to the company or activity, therefore, with the current pandemic, this other remedy would not end solve the immediacy that the case now requires of us.

The solution that allows the adoption of the RePro does not require these points, since the pandemic itself is sufficient and relevant to adopt the special aid measure.

Although not all the points of the new system regulations are yet known, it is noted that It could include the possibility of increasing the amount of aid to pay the salary, if the company that requires it, can prove that it has the SME certificate..

Many of these companies had already applied for it prior to this state of vulnerability to the pandemic and, as the case may be, they could access help in excess of the amount of the minimum wage, vital and mobile; This could then be determined at up to fifty percent of the salary.

It will then be necessary to determine, through regulations, the way in which each employer benefiting from said exceptional aid must process the payment of wages. We understand that the Government could pay it from ANSES or some other new measure.

There is no doubt that this current situation more than justifies the adoption of these measures that were already legislated and the Government shows that it is using all the tools so that day-to-day life can continue despite the isolation.

* Dr. Mariana Verónica Medina is a partner in Estudio Grispo & Asociados.

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