MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Argentine unions: supermarkets index for wage increases

Hugo Moyano CGT leader

The head of Argentina's powerful General Labour Confederation, Hugo Moyano said this week that when collective wage bargaining opens unions will seek salary hikes higher than the official inflation rate of 7.2% announced by the state-run INDEC statistics office.

Moyano said the CGT will use "the 'INDEC' of supermarkets and housewives" before announcing how much of a pay increase it will seek in negotiations with business leaders. Moyano is a staunch ally of the the President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner and her husband Néstor Kirchner, who is also the head of the ruling Peronist party. Moyano is also deputy-chairman of the Peronist party. Moyano, who also controls the powerful truck drivers union, for the past five years has been instrumental to accepting salary caps proposed by the Kirchner administrations. Moyano's union was one of the first to accept a pay hike of 19.5% last year. But CGT has dismissed speculation that the federal government is aiming to cap salary increases at 13.5%. "After five years of wage bargaining we are going to do this with the responsibility we've shown each year," Moyano said. Critics have accused INDEC, which is under the wing of Domestic Trade Secretary Guillermo Moreno, of doctoring the official inflation rate. Private economists have said that the annual inflation rate in 2008 was as high as 20%.