Argentine government launches employment program for young people

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – On Monday, August 9, Argentine President Alberto Fernández launched a program to shore up youth employment in an act in which he justified the quarantine during the Covid-19 pandemic in the midst of the electoral campaign for the September primaries.

Young people are part of one of the groups hit by the Covid-19 pandemic because of rising unemployment and school closures and restrictions imposed to deal with the advance of contagions since last year.

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“There are liberals who talk about freedoms, but they are very conservative”, he insisted, because they propose “that everything continues to work as it was.”

That is why Fernández asked the young people not to support them: “Freedom is freedom for some, and it is catastrophe and hardship for millions.”

Instead, he asked them “more than ever to gather all their strength and rebelliousness to be able to change everything unjust and ungrateful” in the country.

Fernández justified the closure of schools, which was one of the longest closures in the region, based on recommendations made by the World Health Organization because children and adolescents were vectors of contagion.

EMPLOYMENT PLANS

This Monday, the Argentine government launched the second stage of Argentina Programa, a plan to train programmers to have equal access to jobs in the software sector.

The program plans to train 60,000 young people by the end of the year to generate quality jobs in a sector of the economy that in 2019 generated 6,037 million dollars in exports and managed to position itself as the third export pole behind the soybean automotive complexes.

It will also allow each young person who meets progress requirements in the course to access a card from the official Banco Nación with 100,000 pesos (about 1,000 dollars) of subsidy to acquire computers and a stimulus from the national communications entity that will grant cards to obtain a free internet connection.

In the middle of the electoral campaign for the primary elections of next September and the legislative elections of next November, the government had already launched the “Te Sumo” program to generate 50,000 jobs for young people between 18 and 24 years of age by granting economic incentives to small and medium-sized companies that hire them.

According to Indec, the unemployment rate in the first quarter was 10.2 %, but among women between 14 and 29 years of age, it rose to 24.9%, and among men between 14 and 29 years of age, to 17%.