Vice-President Rafael Alburquerque and the country’s leading arbiter Monsignor Agripino Nunez Collado issued separate statements requesting employers to respect the salary agreement devised last week by the National Salaries Commission. Both men referred to the agreement between labor unions and employers that prescribed a 30% wage increase in the DR’s legal minimum wage, as well as a 25% wage increase on those salaries between the minimum wage and RD$20,000 per month. Alburquerque, a labor lawyer and former labor minister, reaffirmed that the agreement signed at the CNS is a pact between the parties, and, as such, is legally binding. In his statement, Monsignor Nunez Collado pushed the business community not to stall any more on the issue. “I believe that agreements must be complied with, apart from what the labor laws and the Constitution say,” stated the monsignor. In Santiago, mega-businessman Feliz Garcia told Hoy reporter Anselmo Silverio that most of the industries in the north of the Dominican Republic had already issued wage increases of between 20% and 30%, even before the recent agreement was drawn up. Garcia recommended that the agreement be respected and said that if there are some industries that have not yet complied with the increase, it is a situation that must be corrected. According to Garcia, the agreement signed last week between CONEP and the workers’ representatives came relatively late for a large part of the business community, which, because of the pressure created by a US dollar valued at RD$50, had already made the wage adjustments. The Santiago business leader said that only those enterprises that had established wage increases of less than 30% would have to adjust their payrolls to fulfill the agreement.