let’s actively confront the privatizers

We reproduce the statement that from the group of classist aeronautical workers El Despegue
We will distribute to everyone at the airports to prepare the resistance:

Argentine Airlines: let’s actively confront the privatizers

Milei’s new right-wing government has adjustment to working people in its DNA. In a few days her speech turned from “the caste is afraid” to the reduction of State workers, this is what the deception consists of. Among the highlights of her program is the privatization of Aerolíneas Argentinas. For this purpose, it uses another fallacy: the delivery of the national flag airline to its workers, maintaining subsidies for a period of one year, would actually be a guaranteed transition to privatization and delivery to the highest bidder. _If we do not face this chronicle of a death foretold, the inexorable consequences_ will be the destruction of Aerolíneas Argentinas and with it the sovereignty of our skies, which by the way we have already been losing with the delivery of routes and the advance of the Low Cost multinationals. Layoffs, reductions in achievements and salaries will be the fate of thousands of aeronautical families, if we do not face them.

For its part, the commercial airline service will be reduced to the profitability of monopolistic companies and the business empire will leave without flights to a huge number of destinations that are not feasible for the profit of the private sector. We already experienced this in the nineties with the Iberia group first and Marsans later, they are proof of corporate rapine, their dynamic is the emptying of our powerful Flag Line.

The privatizers of the new government have the air policies of the outgoing government in their favor. In the last four years, a “covert open skies” orientation was consolidated where “low-cost” private companies made use of dubious “national brands” financed by foreign stock packages. To advance in the Argentine market they used flexible agreements; destruction of union structures and succulent state subsidies. The so-called state “pre-travel” policy promoted and consolidated in the post-pandemic period benefited these private companies much more than Aerolíneas Argentinas itself. For their part, the aeronautical unions fell into absolute passivity. Demobilization in the face of declining wages and conditions was an essential mechanism for the emboldening of the right and the arrival of Milei to power. The union antecedents are many, but without a doubt the drift of the three thousand LATAM workers abandoned to their fate by various union leaders is the immediate precedent. This group of LATAM workers did not lack combativeness or mobilization strength, but they did have plenty of surrender on the part of the unions that had to defend thousands of workers with years of experience in airports. Being clear that the current privatization offensive was the result of demobilization is of vital importance to face the fights that are coming.

The new president put among his first targets for adjustment the colleagues from Conicet, state, public media, YPF and Aerolíneas Argentinas. This being the case, there is a declared battle to which we cannot respond lukewarmly. There is no longer room for statements and statements without actions. The response of the aeronautics must rise to the occasion. Mobilization and direct action are our best defense. The state of deliberation that exists in the world of the aeronautical family imposes the need to hold assemblies in all sectors that provide services at airports, without falling into the division between personnel and outsourced workers, because the adjustment will affect us all. Along these lines, we demand that the aeronautical union leaders immediately convene a General Assembly of all aeronautical workers to define a plan of struggle that resolves to confront the advance of the privatizers. In her demagogic speech Milei ends up recognizing that those of us who manage and move the airports and airplanes are her workers. It will then be a matter of placing our force at the service and in defense of the state-owned Aerolíneas Argentinas under the control of its workers and users.