Vice President and Senate head Victoria Villarruel issued a new norm on Monday stating that all Senate employees have to officially clock in to ensure they are complying with their working hours. The decision comes days after a scandal broke out when a senator admitted he had a large group of advisors working outside of Congress.
Last Wednesday, Senate Provisional President and head of La Libertad Avanza (LLA) bloc Bartolomé Abdala confessed that the majority of his advisors do not work in the Senate but his home province, San Luis, as part of his campaign to become provincial governor.
In an interview with TN news channel, Abdala said he has 15 advisors working for him. However, according to the Senate’s website, they are actually 20. It’s not an unusual number — some senators have more — but 13 of them are working in San Luis, the senator said.
“I want to be governor. In order to do that, I need to have a presence in the territory,” Abdala said. “Many of them give me ideas about what’s going on there, it’s my way of getting updates.”
Starting Thursday, all Senate employees will have to use a fingerprint system at the start and end of their shifts as a measure to “fight against employees that get paid a salary but don’t attend their workplaces.” A Senate communiqué described those workers as “ñoquis” — the Spanish word for gnocchi — a derogatory term used to refer to public workers who supposedly get paid but do not perform their jobs.
However, this won’t apply to senators’ advisors or any other worker dedicated to political tasks. Only administrative employees — around 3500 — will have to clock in and out.
Despite coming just days after the Abdala scandal, a source close to Villarruel said the decision has “nothing to do” with that. They said that the Senate presidency has been working on this for the past four months.
The new system will control that administrative workers are complying with their fixed working hours. “We can’t control political workers in that way,” given “they sometimes work in their territory or finish working late,” the source added.