MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

“Legal security” in Argentina not an issue for US, according to Timerman

Teamsters’ leader Hugo Moyano is promoting a bill forcing corporations to share profits with workers

Argentine Foreign Minister Héctor Timerman assured that in his last visit to Washington DC, neither US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton nor Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs Arturo Valenzuela had any comments regarding legal security in Argentina or Latin America.

“Legal security belongs to all Argentine citizens, not just a small group of business men,” Timerman assured. “We should be debating who profits from enjoying it,” he said, adding that the United States had not made any complaints over it.

Business organizations in Argentina have warned that “legal security” could be at risk based on some recent experiences when large corporations were forced to yield to unions or are under constant attack from the administration of President Cristina Kirchner and her allies.

This refers particularly to the confrontation between Argentina’s main daily with the world’s largest Spanish-language circulation, Clarín and the Kirchners who seem determined by all means to dismember the powerful group, be it by controlling its newsprint source, not renewing the licence of its internet server (Fibertel) and one million subscribers, or claiming that the newspaper’s CEO was an ally and beneficiary of the last military regime.

Furthermore the unions’ umbrella organization CGT has drafted a bill which would make corporations to share profits with unionized workers.

Timerman explained that the legal security issue was never brought up in any of the meetings he held with different government officials in the Obama administration.

“Mrs. Clinton and I never discussed legal security in Argentina or Latin America during our meeting” he said, adding that his other meeting with Mr. Valenzuela was not related to the issue either.

Meanwhile the head of the country’s most powerful labour confederation, CGT, Hugo Moyano said that the project for companies to share their profits with the workers “is already set and ready to go, but we must still discuss certain points of it.”, and added, “We will discuss it next week within the CGT.”

Deputy Héctor Recalde, author of the project, said that ”Everybody is invited to thoroughly discuss the project within the labour committee”.

Likewise, Moyano charged once more against lobbyist and head of the Argentine Industrial Union (UIA) Héctor Méndez, (who said Argentina was on the path to become another Cuba), as the teamster considered that Mendez’s remarks were “totally misplaced”.

“If there is a place where no profit-sharing talks are conduct, that’s Cuba. They do not put into practice these things. On the other hand, it was discussed in Germany 30 or 40 years ago, since these kinds of topics are discussed in capitalist countries and not in countries like Cuba”, Moyano said during a radio interview.

In this regard, the CGT head also said that “There are always bumps in the road when we start discussions about businessmen distributing their enormous profits. This happens because they don’t want to share absolutely nothing”.

“All that entrepreneurs want is to pay as little as possible, so that they can have larger profits. They have done very well in these last years, and they cannot complain. We can let businessmen to keep accumulating wealth on behalf the effort and sacrifice of the workers.”

Amidst the recent controversy arisen as umbrella union boss Hugo Moyano suggested companies should share profits with their employees, the head of the opposition radical caucus in the Lower House, Oscar Aguad, warned that the initiative is “heading the wrong way, since corporations already share their profits through wages,” and warned that in Argentina “half of the workers remain unregistered.”

“It’s ridiculous. Forty percent of the Argentine work force remains unregistered, and that is why the Government is handing out subsidies” he said, and warned Moyano’s chief legal adviser, lawmaker Héctor Recalde, who is currently fostering the initiative, to “look into that problem and not target corporations”.