Milei to Hand Aerolíneas Argentinas to 12,200 Employees, Forum Says

Aerolíneas Argentinas to its employees: the silent privatization

Giving away a loss-making company costs less than liquidating it. That is the logic attributed to Milei in the debate over Aerolíneas Argentinas: transferring the company to its workforce, making workers owners, and letting them decide whether to cut costs, sell, or sink. The deal is not closed anywhere — what is being analyzed is the proposal attributed to him — but it has been enough to reopen the dispute over who pays for the hole in Argentina's flag carrier.

The plan attributed to Milei

The circulating proposal is a privatization without an auction or buyer: employees receive ownership, with the company as it stands, debt included. Those who do not accept their share, supporters of the plan argue, have no voting rights or subsequent complaint, and their portion would be put on the market or distributed among the rest. It is the ideal trap, summarizes one of the most repeated readings: if the workforce purges what needs to be purged, the State gains a healthy company; if not, it sinks and the political cost is borne by others.

The defense has three legs. The first is that the company no longer depends on the public treasury each year. The second is that labor conflict ceases to be a Government problem and becomes an internal one. The third, and not the least, supporters of the plan argue: the Executive cannot be reproached for handing the company to a third party when it is the workers themselves who receive it. Against it plays the actual state of the asset. Some even doubt that the company owns a single plane, as it is common in the sector to operate with rented aircraft, and recalls that unprofitable routes are covered by LADE, a military airline with a dozen planes and four or five destinations in Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego. With LADE, Aerolíneas is not replaced: a map is patched.

12,200 employees and the question no one wants to answer: who is surplus?

Isela Costantini, when she presided over the company, stated on a TV program that upon arrival she found an "excess" of staff: "There are 12,200 and a little more." The problem of turning that into a cooperative is both arithmetic and human. A cut would have to be voted on by the assembly of those directly affected, and no consensus is possible when everyone agrees that there is surplus staff but each knows that the surplus is the neighbor down the aisle. That decision can only be made by an external authority.

How much does an Aerolíneas Argentinas pilot earn?

The comparison circulating in gossip sites places the salary of an Aerolíneas Argentinas pilot above that of Norwegian airlines, and around double that of a Spanish captain according to scales published in industry media. The figure was released with figures in dollars, but without independent verification. If confirmed, it explains quite why the workforce defends the status quo with tooth and nail: the job is not just employment, it is a privileged position within the aviation labor market.

The missing passengers: 11 million versus Colombia's 40 million

Critics of the model cite these figures. Between 2015 and 2019, 53.8 million passengers flew by air in Argentina, the highest record since data exists, in 2001, according to official records cited in the debate. During Menem's deregulation era, with fewer inhabitants, it went from 6 to 13 million travelers, 110% more. And today the country moves only 11 million annually. Chile, with a third of the population, moves about 20 million. Colombia, with similar population, is around 40. Peru, poorer and with fewer inhabitants, is around 20. With those ratios, Argentina should be between 50 and 60 million and not below half.

The Russian precedent and the ghost of a quick sale

The most repeated warning is historical, according to one participant: Yeltsin handed companies to workers and, in his view, the result was industrial destruction and appropriation by foreign capital. Something similar is told of a group of doctors who bought shares of their own clinic to not depend on insurers; when a large sector company arrived, most sold their share and four illusions remained as a memory. Cooperatives, according to the most pessimistic version, end up broken.

There remains a detail often overlooked: the company itself filed closing accounts with $32 million in profit and without public funds, according to headlines circulating about the 2023 exercise. The figure is used as a refutation of the disaster, but says nothing about accumulated liabilities or the surplus workforce.

[Closure] If the transfer succeeds, the most likely outcome is not a thriving cooperative, but a company that seeks a buyer within months while fighting in assembly who goes. To assume this would be an error: the same workforce that today rejects the gift may discover that the external buyer is worse. And if the transfer is not signed, Milei has won anyway, because no one publicly defends keeping Aerolíneas Argentinas anymore.