Doval, General Secretary of the Confederación de Trabajadores Municipales de la República Argentina (CTM) and CONTRAM-PSI — is raising the voice of municpal workers around the world, warning of widespread attacks to decent work, decent wages, collective bargaining and freedom of association.

Doval told the plenary that international conventions on collective bargaining at local and regional government level remain widely unimplemented across Latin America, where precarious work and privatisation are shutting local and regional government workers out of decent work. Repeated violations of freedom of association and collective bargaining are eroding the ability of local and regional government workers’ unions to exercise their mandates. 

In many countries, he argued, wages in local and regional government fall far below the level required by the essential public functions these workers perform. Argentina is one of the most extreme examples: regressive reforms to labour law and collective bargaining pushed through by the Milei government now aim explicitly at limiting and weakening trade union action. 

The modernisation of local and regional government services is impossible without decent work, including trade union rights, Doval argued, because service quality and decent work go hand in hand. A local or regional government that cannot bargain collectively, cannot pay decent wages, and cannot guarantee freedom of association and collective bargaining cannot deliver quality public services — whatever reforms are layered on top. 

CONTRAM-PSI is progressively building dialogue with FLACMA — the Latin American Federation of Cities, Municipalities and Associations — to raise decent work, freedom of association and collective bargaining onto the agenda of national federations of mayors and local and regional governments. 

Inside PSI’s plan of action, and under the banner “think globally, act locally”, CONTRAM-PSI is also pressing for the remunicipalisation of outsourced local and regional public services: to recover public budgets, restore public interest above private profit, rebuild strategic public sector capacity, and repair the link between public investment and quality services. Local and regional government services, Doval said, belong in the hands of the local state — not privatised, not outsourced. 

Doval set out CONTRAM-PSI’s defining programme in five demands: the right to bargain collectively; the binding collective agreement that should follow; guaranteed freedom of association; the end of precarious work; and decent wages. He called them "the banner we raise, the programme we defend, and the struggle we sustain". 

He closed:

About CONTRAM-PSI

The Confederation of Municipal Workers of the Americas (CONTRAM-PSI) is one of PSI’s regional sectoral networks, representing local and regional government and municipal workers’ unions across Latin America and the Caribbean.

Founded in 2014 and part of PSI’s Global LRG Network, CONTRAM-PSI elected its 2024–2029 leadership at IAMRECON in Bogotá in November 2024, with Hernán Doval of the Confederación de Trabajadores Municipales de la República Argentina (CTM) as General Secretary and Juneia Martins Batista of Sindisep Brazil as President.