Caracas, 15 Mar The increase in the minimum wage in Venezuela by 1,705%, announced by President Nicolás Maduro last week and which will rise from $1.6 a month to just under $29, is insufficient for those who receive it — mainly public employees and pensioners — to lift themselves out of extreme poverty, according to various experts and those affected themselves. With the new salary, Venezuelans still do not reach the figure of $1.90 a day set by the World Bank to consider the way out of extreme poverty by income range, although they stay much closer than with the current salary, going from 0.05 to 0.96 dollars a day. However, if you add the food voucher, which Maduro says would rise from 3 to 45 bolivars ($10.5) and received only by workers, but which leaves pensioners out, the income reaches $39.4, which is $1.31 per day. The new salary goes into effect, as announced by the Executive Vice President of the Caribbean country, Delcy Rodríguez, for the second half of March. In the opinion of the Secretary General of the Confederation of Workers of Venezuela (CTV), José Elias Torres, the Government has not thought about the daily reality of those affected, in a complex economic context and with the dollarized country. “Without measuring the reality that workers and pensioners are going through (...) with an economy on the floor, (...) that has gradually become dollarized (...) after almost a year without an announcement of increase, it surprises us again with half a petro. We are still in a rather critical situation,” Torres said. INSUFFICIENT SALARY Less than a week after the announcement, workers, especially health and teaching staff, and pensioners and retirees took to the streets demanding a living wage and better working conditions. “We don't have enough wages to live, my God, help us. We are demanding a living wage, we want quality of life, for our grandchildren to return and for our families to reunite, we are with homes totally in an empty nest. The salary they have just executed does not cover the basic basket,” a woman, who did not reveal her identity, told Efe during a protest on March 8. An average Venezuelan family of five needs at least $353 a month to meet their minimum food needs, an amount that has increased by 24.7% in the last year, according to the Venezuelan Finance Observatory (OVF). Efe toured several shops in popular areas of central Caracas and found that with the new salary you can buy about 13 products out of the 60 contained in the basic food basket, such as 1 kilo of corn flour, rice, sugar, margarine, pasta, black caraotas (beans), lentils, cheese, ham, meat and chicken, as well as a liter of oil and half a carton of eggs. Retailers and consumers consulted do not expect the new increase to significantly increase sales. Older adults, for their part, demanded that pensions be above $900. REPEATED EPISODE According to Maduro, setting the minimum wage in half a petro was a proposal made by the workers and with which he said he agreed. However, since August 2018, when the government increased the then salary by 5,900%, income is, in theory, anchored to Venezuelan cryptocurrency. But, in practice, the petro continued to rise and the salary fell behind. The current income of 7 bolivars was equivalent to 0.02 petros. BREACH OF INTERNATIONAL CONVENTIONS A Commission of Inquiry appointed by the International Labour Organization (ILO) — number 13 in the agency's 100-year history — which visited the country in 2019, noted that the Government is not complying, among others, with Convention 26 on methods for fixing minimum wages by not convening a tripartite dialogue to establish income. The general secretary of the CTV assured Efe that neither the union federations nor the employers, including Fedecámaras, Venezuela's main employer, were consulted before the announcement. In fact, this “unconsulted” increase was announced four days before Labour Minister José Ramón Rivero, six trade union centrals and several business representatives set up a virtual tripartite dialogue with the mediation of ILO Director-General Guy Ryder, and they hope to continue on April 25 with face-to-face meetings. The workers, who hope that these meetings will bear fruit, agree that the road to recovery of their quality of life must be started not only with a salary that equals the basket, but also with measures that reduce the economic crisis that the country is experiencing with one of the highest inflation in the world. Carlos Seijas Meneses