Management looks for a consensus on salary increases

SANTO DOMINGO. The re-elected president of the Management Confederation of the Dominican Republic (Copardom) said yesterday that the business sector is seeking a consensus with the union leaders in order to present a united proposal on a salary increase to the government.

Jaime Gonzalez reported that this process was agreed upon after a meeting with the sector that is representing the workers and that it will begin after the businessmen finalize an evaluation of the impact on the companies of the tax reform.

"The companies are in a process of re-engineering due to the tax reform. We asked them to give us the month of January in order to evaluate the impact," explained Gonzalez to reporters after the end of an assembly in which he was re-elected for another two-year period at the head of Copardom.

He noted that the business community is interested in agreeing to a percentage increase in salaries that allows the workers to recover the lost margin in their purchasing power after the increases in prices due to the tax reform.

Labor Code

As he answered questions regarding the priorities in this new term at the head of Copardom, Gonzalez indicated that as one of the goals of the organization is to motivate a flexibility in the Labor Code which protects the small and medium companies against what they consider to be "labor demands" not within their capacity and "that can take them to bankruptcy."