On Tuesday, August 11, the PIT-CNT will take to the streets with a partial strike from 9 AM to 1 PM. Mobilization from the University to the Legislative. The platform is the same as always: more money for education, more money against child poverty, an extra little tax on the richest 1%, and at the center of the demand, the anger because the government did not satisfy them with the AFAP. They want to limit the commercial role of the administrators, centralize membership in a public organization, and reduce what they call “profit.” The government said no. And it was right to do so.
The numbers do not allow for any embellishment. As of March 31, 2026, the AFAP funds totaled 1,085,066 million pesos: 27,030 million dollars. Average fund per member: 622,762 pesos. República AFAP takes 54.9% of the total and has nearly 650,000 accounts. That money is not a collective pit or a “people's savings.” They are individual accounts. Every peso belongs to a specific worker who contributed month after month with the legal promise that this capital belonged to them. The commissions are deducted from their account. The profitability is credited to their account. The State already regulates, supervises, and limits (only 15% can go abroad). But that is not enough for the central.
What the PIT-CNT demands, with the usual language, is to dig deeper. Less commercial link, more “public orientation,” more political control over the distribution of members. The window-dressing argument is generous: less commissions, more justice, better retirement. The real argument is different: to transform private savings into a variable for adjusting public spending. Because when individual ownership is weakened, the horizon shortens, and the immediate pressure for more benefits or more “social” destinations wins the game. Capital ceases to be long-term provision and becomes available cash.
This is the same logic that has already left the country with a fiscal deficit of 4.7% of GDP, an official tax pressure of 27.4% that inflates even more with public monopoly rates, fees, and regulatory costs, and private investment contracting by 4.6% in 2026. In that scenario, discussing “centralizing” or “reorienting” 27,000 million dollars of pension savings is not a technical improvement. It is a signal that private ownership of capital is negotiable. And capital, unlike the central, does not strike: it retracts, leaves, or simply does not appear.
Uruguayan unionism has spent decades perfecting the art of demanding more state while the state already consumes an increasing portion of the product. Now they want to touch the only pillar that still preserves some logic of individual capitalization. The BPS remains in chronic red. Investment is at relative lows (14% of GDP). Growth is dragging at 1.3%. And the response is to pressure for workers' savings to be managed with more political criteria and less profitability criteria. Brilliant.
The additional 1% tax on the wealth of the richest 1% to “combat child poverty” completes the picture. What is visible is the noble cause. What is invisible is the additional disincentive in an economy that no longer attracts sufficient capital. Capital is not generated in assemblies. It is generated when someone decides to take risks, postpone consumption, and preserve the fruit. Every time there is a threat to redistribute or redirect that fruit due to street pressure, the incentive is destroyed. The result is not more social security. It is less savings, less investment, and, in the long run, weaker pensions in real terms.
To pretend that individual savings are a resource available for the central's agenda does not withstand even 5 minutes of serious analysis. Those 27,030 million dollars are not “people's money” in the abstract. They are the accumulated work of hundreds of thousands of people. Turning them into a political variable does not strengthen provision. It liquidates it. And it does so with the same cynicism as always: promising more for everyone while eroding the only real basis of accumulation. The numbers are already there. The rest is consequence.
