Argentine National Congress lower house member, Jose-Luis Ramon, has proposed legislation that’d allow employees to get the whole or part of their pay in Bitcoins and certain other cryptocurrencies. Ramon said that this proposed bill would apply to those working on an ‘exporter of services’ tag in a tweet sent out on Tuesday. However, it’ll also apply to the people who need their employer for income, of which he further claimed that the employers themselves are the ones responsible of handling all the transaction fees.
Ramon further stated that the idea is to help strengthen a worker’s autonomy as well as help them retain their remuneration’s purchasing power. The initiative is based on the need to encourage greater governance and autonomy of wages. With the crypto option, exporters won’t have to convert their money into Argentinian pesos.
The government of Argentina compelled exporters of service to change their income to Argentine pesos from dollars via the 2019 exchange channel. But, this proposed crypto bill would mean that people working overseas won’t necessarily have to convert their pay to Argentine pesos once they get back home. This is a good thing, considering the Argentine peso is hit by around a 50% inflation every year.
In May, Argentina’s inflation was around 3.3%, which then went up to 21.5% for the year. Year-on-year inflations come to around 48.8%. In 18 months, the peso devalued from $0.02 – $0.006. This is one of the reasons why this proposed bill makes so much sense to Ramon.
A platform that allows for the conversion of fiat into cryptocurrency, Bitwage, had a monthly transaction growth of 300%, meaning many Argentines were looking to convert what they had earned into Bitcoin.
Argentina not alone
Argentina is one of the top crypto exchange regions in Latin America. With that said, they aren’t the first country to come up with such a law. In February this year, Miami also came up with similar legislation allowing providing municipal workers the chance to get a part of their full pay in Bitcoins.
