The blockist coordinator defended this Friday that the battle for wages “is the only one who can balance the economy”as the increase in food or energy prices is mainly due to the increase in profit margins.
“The conclusions of the Eurozone data are that it is the increase in profit margins that currently continues to put pressure on food, energy and essential goods prices in Portugal and in the rest of Europe”said Catarina Martins at the opening of a parliamentary hearing on “Gender and Equal Pay”.
According to the leader of the BE, citing news from the Reuters bureau about a meeting of the European Central Bank (ECB), “At the moment there is concrete data from the economy, and in particular from the eurozone economy, that inflation processes have nothing to do with wages and nothing to do with demand.”
“What the data from the European economy tells us, and which the ECB already has, is that it is not the war in Ukraine or the breakdown of production chains in the post-pandemic that justifies the levels of inflation we are seeing in resources as fundamentally as energy or food”he said.
Catarina Martins admits that there are increased costs due to interruptions in the production chain during the post-pandemic or the costs and difficulties arising from the war in Ukraine.the biggest expense and the biggest difference is the increase in the profit margins of the big companies”.
“The battle over wages is the only battle that can balance the economy, because it’s the only way to make sense of this utterly insane age, when even those who work full time and are paid by law, that can’t put food on the table”he stressed.
Now that International Women’s Day is almost upon us, Catarina Martins thought about it “this March 8 could be another demonstration, yet another significant street moment in so much that is happening” for this “salary claim”.
“It’s an unequal battle for women because there really is a glass ceiling,” complained.
Due to the current situation, the BE has opted this year to hold the salary debate on the eve of March 8 this year because “salary is still a life and death struggle,” said the blockade leader.
“Women are more insecure, have lower salaries and are more exposed to poverty and therefore the difficulties for women are even greater when the salary has this difficulty”defended.
Catarina Martins reiterated feminism as “part of Bloco de Esquerda’s DNA” and made it clear that the party believes “in this radical idea of equality between men and women, among all people”.
ISEG professor Sara Falcão Casaca was one of the guests at the parliamentary hearing and in her speech recalled how difficult it is to reach a consensus on the best way to measure the expression of gender pay inequality.
Despite the 13% difference usually reported between men’s and women’s salaries, it is “almost difficult” for Sara Falcão Casaca to find a method “as imperfect” as the one that generated this statistic.
The researcher presented the gender pay gap (DRHM) as the most reliable method for the evaluation of wage inequality that “cleans out the effects of differences that men and women may have and which may justify the difference”.
According to this method, the real wage difference between men and women is around 21% and these differences can only be justified in 15% of cases.
Source: DN
