Strike me down

The municipal public employees are on strike since yesterday, and for the nth time, asking for a raise. I've been wanting to see a photo exhibition at the Museo de la Ciudad, but since it's run by those very municipal employees, it's impossible. Last week on Tuesday I went to the museum, and only after ten minutes of looking around did I remember the employees were on strike. It wasn't a waste, because the museum is after all within a beautiful park and I was accompanied by a beautiful lady, but the exhibition (which I'm told is large and very good) remains unseen to me.

I don't know what the municipal employees are trying to do here. I understand that prices have gone up and the Christmas/New Year season brings even more expenses than usual, but everyone in the government offices has half their things packed for vacations already, and they're going to get a customary "adjustment" salary raise first thing next year.

On the other hand, I don't get why (besides tradition) government offices have to change at this time of the year. Nobody wants to dress up and hear long speeches, everyone wants to leave town and flee the scorching summer for the beach or the mountains, and no-one wants to start anything that demands work. The general consensus at my workplace is that the heavy restructuring that governor Hermes Binner will surely effect on the provincial public administration will not begin until March, which means four lost months just because the office-taking was done in December.

Binner will face troubles soon too, since now that there's a Rosario Socialist in the Grey House (the government seat, in Santa Fe City) and many Rosarinos will be moving there from the municipal administration to become provincial officials, information and gossip will travel faster, and already the news is that (as everyone suspected) the municipal employees of Rosario are much better paid than us, their counterparts in the province, and much better treated. One of the subtly stated campaign devices of Binner's was that he could do for the province what he had done for Rosario, which everyone agrees has turned into a much nicer city during the past Socialist administrations (Cavallero, twice Binner, and Lifschitz). So we (or our union) will surely be joining the municipal workers in Rosario, asking not only for a raise, but for a raise that brings us closer to them.

And of course, looming above the whole country, there's union leader Hugo Moyano, already facing up to the Presidenta — in fact saying "If you don't give us what we want, we may not continue to be your allies". Cristina K really seems to be more comfortable around industrial moguls and other businessmen than close to Moyano and his vociferously thuggish supporters, who can strike Cristina in both figurative senses of the word, since they de facto command the distribution of goods throughout the country.

And that ends today's political rant. Useless, I know. At the end of it all, I still can't go see my exhibition...