Trade unions’ strike disrupts travel in Argentina
BUENOS AIRES: Argentina’s biggest trade unions mounted one of their fiercest challenges to the libertarian government of President Javier Milei, staging a mass general strike on Thursday that led to the cancellation of hundreds of flights and halted key bus, rail and subway lines.
Main avenues and streets, as well as major transportation terminals were left eerily empty.
The 24-hour strike against Milei’s contentious austerity measures and deregulation push threatened to bring the nation of 46 million to a standstill as banks, businesses and state agencies closed in protest.
Most teachers couldn’t make it to school and parents kept their kids at home.
Trash collectors walked off the job - as did health workers, except for those in emergency rooms.
The government said transport service disruptions would prevent some 6.6 million people from making it to work. That was apparent during the morning rush-hour on Thursday as few cars could be seen on streets typically snarled with traffic.
Garbage was already piling up on deserted sidewalks.
The country’s largest union, known by its acronym CGT, said it was staging the strike alongside other labor syndicates “in defense of democracy, labor rights and a living wage.”
Argentina’s powerful unions - backed by Argentina’s left-leaning Peronist parties that have dominated national politics for decades - have led the pushback to Milei’s policies on the streets and in the courts in recent months.
“We are facing a government that promotes the elimination of labor and social rights,” the unions said, seeking to portray Thursday’s strike as an explosion of public outrage over Milei’s free-market policies that have disproportionately affected poor and middle classes.
The government downplayed the disruption as a cynical ploy by its left-wing political opponents.
“They want to keep Argentina on a path of servitude,” said presidential spokesperson Manual Adorni of the union leaders, accusing them of “extorting Argentines to try to return to power.”