Maduro announces an increase in the “minimum monthly income” to 130 dollars

After spending a long time without decreeing significant salary increases in an unconfessed effort to contain inflation, the president of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro, finally announced this Wednesday the increase in the Minimum Comprehensive Income of Venezuelan workers to 130 dollars per month. The announcement was made in the middle of the official celebrations to celebrate Workers’ Day in the country, this May 1. “I have decided to increase the minimum income of workers on an indexed basis, so that it impacts purchasing capacity. From January to May, we have already increased the income of workers by 86%,” said the president amid the applause of his followers, on a national radio and television network.

The Minimum Comprehensive Income is not, precisely, the salary: it is the sum of the formal salary, one of the lowest in the world, located around four dollars per month, with a package of added bonuses that have no effect on the calculation on social benefits or social benefits, but they are paid each month. The salary bonus is, at this time, one of the most frequent complaints in the union centers and workers’ and professionals’ leagues of the Venezuelan civil opposition, which resent the existing allocations for social security or retirements and the very poor salary scales of the professional world, in a country that has a broken and inoperative public health system.

Some of these protests, which have quickly taken flight in the streets, have been repressed by the Maduro Government in recent months. The authorities have imprisoned several union leaders accused of terrorism and then commuted their sentences to parole agreements with judicial presentation. In recent days, memes and flyers have been circulating profusely on social networks calling for digital protests demanding salary improvements in the country.

This Wednesday, the Maduro Government made a special effort to offer some show of political vigor, taking with its followers the Avenida del Libertador, and simultaneously broadcasting several of the ruling party’s rallies in the country on television. The demonstrations of Chavismo and the opposition crossed paths in some parts around the central Plaza Venezuela, in a confrontation where punches and insults abounded, which did not escalate.

The executive vice president of the Republic, Delcy Rodríguez, highlighted the recovery of workers’ salaries, “despite the multiple threats, sanctions and harassment,” and positively praised the environment of dialogue and agreements that has been built in the country with the private sector.

The Venezuelan economy began to collapse in 2014, during the implementation of a program of nationalization, conflicts with capital and controls on the economy that resulted in a million-dollar drain on money after a serious exchange crisis. In the period 2013-2018, Maduro had countless disagreements with the business community – “the parasitic bourgeoisie,” he called it – which he blamed for the serious shortage of goods and medicines at the time, allegedly for organizing acts of sabotage and speculation. “The bourgeoisie wants dollars,” the president once said with a mocking tone and challenging his enemies, in 2013. “What we are going to give them is pain.”

During those years, on several occasions, Maduro decreed exorbitant salary increases, within the framework of strict price control. They were unilateral decrees, higher than the level of inflation, with retroactive effect, impossible to pay for a private sector that was already sufficiently harassed with judicial sieges, fiscal voracity, slowness in the market, partial interventions and collective takeovers in the interior of the country.

These increases, which bankrupted many people, were fuel for the economic crisis, and ended up giving shape to the first hyperinflationary crisis that Venezuela had. The exchange, monetary and fiscal crisis caused the oil business to go bankrupt and the workers’ salaries turned to ashes. This entire process took place in a context of excessive corruption. This precipitated a massive emigration of people to other countries.

Starting in 2019, with the bankruptcy of the state oil company PDVSA, the Maduro Government decided to change its economic strategy, identifying and recognizing inflation as the number one public enemy of his Government and society. With international sanctions slowing down his efforts to raise money, the president gave in to demands advising him of fiscal prudence and discretion in public spending to balance the country’s disastrous accounts, whose formal numbers were omitted by the Central Bank of Venezuela for several years. years. The effort of these three years has forced him to turn a deaf ear to the multiple complaints from the Venezuelan labor world.

After crack From that period, the modest expansion of the economy that has been registered in the country as of 2021 allows Maduro to present some improvement to the workers in an election year, once the hyperinflationary storm is over.

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