After months of conflict and strikes, Javier Milei’s government yielded to the demands of Argentina’s university community and on Wednesday ordered a pay increase for professors and other higher education workers. It also announced it will allocate funds to boost universities’ operating budgets and those of their hospitals, though it will not increase grants for financial-aid scholarships for low-income students. The announced raises represent a partial reversal of the president’s budget-cutting measures, but remain below the university-financing law passed by Congress that Milei refuses to implement. For that reason, universities warned that the measure is “an important step but by no means definitive or sufficient.”
The increases were agreed by the government, the National Interuniversity Council (CIN) and the sector’s unions. “The Executive Branch will transfer to the national universities the funds intended to increase the wage bill by 24.33%,” the statement issued by the Ministry of Human Capital says. There will be an initial 21.33% raise with June pay and a further 3% in October.
According to the minutes signed, with those figures, salaries will recover what they lost to inflation during 2025 and through May of this year, plus a smaller portion of the decline suffered in 2024. As part of the agreement, the government also acceded to the unions’ demand to open a collective bargaining round every three months: within that framework, parties must discuss how to restore the remainder of the purchasing power lost since Milei took office.
The CIN — the body that brings together public universities — has denounced that budget transfers to the sector have suffered a cumulative fall of 45.6% since December 2023, while professors’ and university workers’ salaries lost about one third of their purchasing power.
The agreement also provides that the government will “increase by 20% the amount for universities’ operating expenses starting in June” and will “allocate an additional 50 billion pesos (about $34.7 million) to the budget line for university hospitals.” It also establishes “a 50% increase” for the scholarships known as Manuel Belgrano: the program promotes degrees considered strategic for the country and currently benefits 35,941 students. The government did not announce improvements to the Progresar financial-aid scholarships, which across the education system currently reach 971,280 low-income students (just over 186,000 of them at the university level).
The CIN considered that the agreed wage and budget update “is an important step but by no means definitive or sufficient,” since “it in no way resolves the structural problem” facing universities. The statement released Wednesday by the body argued that “the structural response lies in the full implementation of the university-financing law.” As a bargaining condition, the government had initially demanded that universities drop their legal claim seeking enforcement of that law, which Congress approved last year and which was later ratified when Milei vetoed it. “The legal action remains in place until the law is applied in full,” the CIN stressed.
The law that the president has refused to implement, arguing it would jeopardize public finances, envisages updating the entire university budget according to inflation accumulated since late 2023. Without taking into account the newly announced increase, the current annual budget for the sector includes 4.8 trillion pesos (about $3.4 billion), and applying the law would mean adding, according to various estimates, between 2.5 and 3.1 trillion pesos. The fiscal impact — the CIN estimates — would be around 0.36% of Argentina’s GDP. The universities’ lawsuit against the government is in the hands of the Supreme Court of Justice.
“After more than two and a half years of sustained struggle and four nationwide mass marches in which the Argentine people overwhelmingly expressed their support for public universities, we achieved that the national government call collective bargaining and present a proposal to begin restoring the wages lost since Milei became president,” said the Federation of University Teachers (Fedun), one of the unions that represent professors.
Although other trade-union sectors voiced opposition to accepting the agreement with the government and supported maintaining strike action until the law is enforced, the conflict appears to have entered a phase of détente. Its future will be determined in upcoming negotiations between the government and the unions.
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