Guilds protest before the Paraguayan Congress during the budget study

A thousand people from different unions met on Wednesday before the Congress building to ask for salary improvements, waiting for the Senate to pronounce today on the General Budget of the Nation 2018.

Asunción, Nov 22 (EFE) .- A thousand people from different unions met on Wednesday before the Congress building to ask for salary improvements, waiting for the Senate to pronounce today on the General Budget of the Nation 2018.

Among those gathered in the central Plaza de Armas are officials from the National University of Asuncion (UNA), this week they ceased their administrative activities to demand an increase of the budgetary item destined to achieve a salary readjustment of 25%.

The claim is supported by the students of the university, which carried Paraguayan flags and banners against the "privatization" of the center, the country's leading public higher education.

In the concentration they take also part workers of the state National Electricity Administration (ANDE), which for weeks have been demanding from the Ministry of Finance an adjustment of the Minimum Reference Salary to which the bonuses are indexed.

The other concentrated group is that of public teachers, who ask the Senate to revert the position of the first of the month of the Chamber of Deputies, which rejected his request for a salary increase, giving half a sanction to an inferior project and defended by the Executive.

The Lower House then voted an increase in salaries of 12% from January, and for the next four years, while teachers' unions asked to add to that 12% in January by 8% more in July, to end the year with 20% in total.

different guilds have in the modifications that the Senate introduces today the possibility of obtaining their pretensions of wage increases or redistribution of budgets.

The 2018 budget obtained, at the beginning of November, a sanction in the Chamber of Deputies, which introduced substantial changes in some portfolios, increasing the final budget amount of about 62 million dollars in relation to the budget project presented by the Executive.

After the increase in the budget amount in Deputies, the Finance and Budget Commission of the Senate determined a reduction of almost seven million dollars.

The modifications made by the senators during the session on Wednesday will have to return to the Lower House for the last parliamentary term and to definitively sanction the budget, possibly in a few days or next week.