Commerce’s proposals for Phase 2: industry requests special permits, greater oversight of informal workers and more capacity

Starting this Thursday, the entire Metropolitan Region will go to Phase 2 of the Step by Step plan, which implies having a quarantine on weekends. This, after the Ministry of Health decided to go back in the process of deconfinement.

The decision of the health authority came after the daily Minsal report, released last Monday, reported an increase in the number of new daily cases, a situation that “given the number of inhabitants of the RM It has a very high impact and we are very concerned ”, said the same minister of the sector, Enrique Paris, on the occasion.

The radical adjustment took the commerce sector by surprise and forced it to reposition itself based on the new restrictions that only allow it to operate from Monday to Friday to the item in general, considering that December, and in particular the Christmas season, is by far the best of the year for the sector.

The main argument of the trade to defend before the authority a special treatment in this phase setback, points out that the main vectors of propagation occur in social gatherings and in the agglomerations that occur on public roads, many of them associated with commerce informal, a situation that they indicate from the sector is different from what happens in formal commercial establishments that do act under care protocols.

The government assured that they are analyzing proposals to alleviate the effect of the measure for this sector. On Wednesday, the Minister of Economy, Lucas Palacios, announced that his portfolio was evaluating concrete measures such as delaying the entry of the curfew and allowing its operation when the quarantine is in force, but so far nothing has been settled, and that is why trade He went ahead and presented a bunch of proposals with which they will insist before the authority.

But from the National Chamber of Commerce (CNC) they go further and insist on the repeal of the curfew. The union says that this would greatly benefit the sector, because it would have more hours available to serve consumers and avoid crowds.

“The fact of not being able to go out to buy on weekends, added to a restricted schedule, we believe that it can result in a greater sanitary risk”, maintains the union, at the same time as proposing the implementation of a special rescue program for trade and tourism nationwide.

The Santiago Chamber of Commerce (CCS) points to informal commerce as the main propagating agent of the virus, given the agglomerations that form. In this sense, it proposes to concentrate containment efforts, including inspection of these activities as a directed way to effectively combat contagions.

They also propose that the capacity of the established trade be expanded, maintaining at least 50% of store capacity and distancing 1 person every 5 square meters. “If these gauges are reduced by half, added to the forced closure of the weekend, the agglomerations on the outskirts of established commerce and informal commerce, we see it seriously difficult to meet the containment objectives of the health authority,” they say from the guild.

Finally, they propose to allow the opening of all formal commerce during weekends, establishing special permits “so that consumers can attend in an orderly manner to make their Christmas purchases at the different establishments.” This last point is the one they also share in the Retail Brands Association. Its president, Paula Valderde, maintains that the idea of ​​all this is to create a “transfer permit such as the one that works to go to the supermarket, but which is focused on stores with a duration similar to that of current permits and with the possibility of taking at least one per week ”.