Argentina’s Labor Secretariat ordered oilseed workers’ unions and management back to the negotiating table for a procedure known as an obligatory conciliation. As a result, workers will turn to their jobs for a period of 15 days, which began on Monday at 10:30 a.m. 

Unions have been on strike since August 6, paralyzing the key export sector. The industrial action has led to losses of US$10 million per day. 

The secretariat “exhorts the parties to the conflict to maintain the best predisposition and openness to negotiate over the topics about which they have differences, and thereby contribute to social peace and improving the framework of labor relations at the heart of the activity concerned,” it said in a statement.

Oilseed companies requested the procedure following an inability to “recover dialogue with union leaders” and workers refusing to “carry out their activities normally,” the CIARA/CEC business chamber said Monday. 

They also accused unions of deliberately stranding truck drivers roadside by beginning the strike without prior warning.

“Now is the time to reach salary agreements and leave aside aspirations and critiques of public policy that exceed the scope of the wage negotiations,” the CIARA/CEC statement read.

Meanwhile, the Oilseed Workers’ and Employees’ Union (SOEA, by its Spanish acronym), along with the Federation of Workers of the Oilseed Industrial Complex and the Cotton Gins and Related Workers of the Argentine Republic (FTCIODyARA), issued a joint statement of their own. 

“The ministerial resolution demonstrates the falsehood of the CIARA and the companies’ claim that we, the unions, were the ones who refused to attend a negotiating table,” it said. “It also demonstrates their habit of speculation, which caused the strike to be extended for a week in order to obtain other types of benefits in a struggle with the government, unrelated to the oilseed workers. They engaged in this same behavior in 2015 and 2020.”

Obligatory conciliation is a mechanism for resolving labor disputes that the Labor Secretariat can apply when parties have failed to reach an agreement. It implies that both the strike and any firings that have occurred since it began must be reversed.

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Unions are calling for the monthly wage in the sector to be increased to AR$1.55 million (US$1,618 at the official rate, US$1,194 at the MEP rate) for July. This would entail a 26% increase, but employers are offering 17%, the unions say.

Companies say workers have received a 77% salary increase during a period in which inflation reached 79%. They are also offering a 12% increase in August and a further 5% in September, leading to a total increase by September 2024 of 94% — a figure they say will be ahead of inflation.