Salaries and inflation
During the Cambia Mendoza Governments, education workers have faced significant wage losses, a problem that has worsened during the 2020-2021 period. In this regard, it is important to remember that in 2020 there were no wage increases, and the increases in 2021 have not been enough to recover what was lost last year.
In order to restore the purchasing power of salaries to 2015 levels, the provincial government would need to grant a 43% increase for custodians, a 41.4% increase for positions, and a 44.8% increase for teaching hours, based on the December 2021 salary. It is important to mention that the different values obtained during 2020 are due to some slight adjustments that teachers received thanks to the national negotiations, which regulate the minimum wage and the items financed by the national government.
In all the analyzed benchmark cases, we can see that none of them have reached the price increase since last year. To maintain the 2019 salary, a person with two teaching positions would need a 30% increase, while someone with 18 hours would need an 18% increase.
Salaries and the Basic Basket
The problem of wage loss against inflation becomes even more severe when we consider the standard of living that education workers and their families can afford with their salaries. To analyze this, we compared the salaries of the benchmark cases with the Total Basic Basket (CBT) for a “Type II” family in October 2021, which was $67,124 (the latest available data), and incorporated the projected inflation for the last two months of the year to estimate its value in December. As a result, we found that none of the benchmark cases analyzed even come close to the income threshold that the government itself defines as the minimum required to avoid being considered “poor”.