Government prepares new battery of measures for workers in the face of quarantine impact in RM

The same day that the government enacted the Emergency Family Income, people began to think about the need to carry out a new design to help the most vulnerable workers and families through transfers or bonuses.

Although a new package of measures was in the pipeline, considering that of the total resources allocated to the informal sector, Emergency Income used only US $ 800 million of the total US $ 2,000 million, the announcement of the total quarantine for 38 communes in the The Metropolitan Region, due to the sharp rise in the number of people infected by the coronavirus, led to the advancement of this plan of new measures, which will also add to what has already been announced for independent workers.

There is still no clear date for its launch, which again will seek to deliver the benefit in a focused manner.

The Minister of Social Development, Sebastián Sichel, maintained that “if we have learned anything, it is that flexibility is required and we need to see the scenarios to better support families.” In this sense, he said that “a month ago we believed that the only solution was to increase the Covid bonus, which reached 2.7 million people, and one month made us realize that we needed support for 4.9 million, so we are not going to give up on continuing to support these families, but we must see how it unfolds. “

The date of the implementation of this plan is not defined, but the axes it will have.

According to Sichel, the following steps are clear. The first of these is the direct transfer of resources to vulnerable sectors, the second axis is to have plans such as subsidies to protect employment and avoid layoffs, and the third is programs to subsidize the hiring of labor when the confinement has ended and the activity can come back. This point would be more related to the exit policies from the crisis prepared by the Executive.

“Those three points will be part of the package of measures,” said Sichel. And he added that “for all these proposals, resources are committed.”

Reinforcing the new plan, the minister of the General Secretary of the Presidency, Felipe Ward, said that “this is one of several measures, it is not the only one, and therefore it is important to be certain that the Covid agenda is an open agenda” .

A little earlier, in the same currency, the Minister of Finance, Ignacio Briones, also spoke of the economic plans that the government has promoted and those that are coming in the coming months. “Our plan is focused on mitigating the effects as much as possible and, above all, preventing these transitory effects from becoming permanent,” he said. Regarding the country’s economic growth and the impact that the quarantine of the Metropolitan Region will have, the head of the Treasury said that although it is very difficult to say an exact number for the May Imacec, he did assert that “we are going to have a second quarter very bad, a number we didn’t know decades ago. ” He added that the expectation is that next year there will be a significant recovery, “but there are pockets of uncertainty and for this reason we are going to need to put the emphasis on having a powerful plan for economic recovery and employment, that is essential.”

This Friday the ministers of Economy, Lucas Palacios, and of Labor, María José Zaldívar, announce the essential sectors, that is, those that can continue to operate in quarantine.

In the last hours, the government evaluated including construction as one of these sectors, however, until this Thursday the decision was not to include them, which will affect more than 300,000 workers who work in these works.