Castellón tile workers ask that the aid be linked to job improvements

Workers from the province of Castellón demonstrated yesterday at the doors of the headquarters of ASCER, the Spanish association of ceramic flooring manufacturers, in Castelló de la Plana to request a reactivation of the negotiations of the collective agreement in view of the complicated situation that companies and templates.

Thomas Osborne
Thomas Osborne
21 October 2022 Friday 21:41
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Castellón tile workers ask that the aid be linked to job improvements

Workers from the province of Castellón demonstrated yesterday at the doors of the headquarters of ASCER, the Spanish association of ceramic flooring manufacturers, in Castelló de la Plana to request a reactivation of the negotiations of the collective agreement in view of the complicated situation that companies and templates.

So far this year there are 7,000 workers affected by an ERTE and the EREs have already begun to be applied in some companies, suffocated by the energy crisis. ASCER quantified 400 jobs that have already been lost so far. But in this scenario, the employees and employees remember that "both inflation and the impact of the ERTE are also passing over us".

For this reason, yesterday, summoned by UGT-PV and CCOO-PV, they asked that the aid -which the sector repeatedly requests from the central government- be given "as long as they have renewed and signed economic conditions and a labor agreement framework with their increases for current workers.

This was explained by Jordi Riera, secretary of the tile sector in CCOO-PV, after the concentration held yesterday in the capital of La Plana, which had brought together the delegates to an assembly to discuss the current situation of the blockade of the negotiations and decide the next steps to take this fall.

The march went from the Plaza María Agustina to the headquarters of the tile association, at whose gates they sang various songs. "We firmly believe that employers are taking advantage of a situation in which they intend to make wages in the sector even more precarious," added the trade unionist.

For their part, this week the governing bodies of the Business Confederation of the Valencian Community and its Energy Commission, chaired by the also president of ASCER, Vicente Nomdedeu, agreed to highlight that the lack of direct aid to get through this temporary situation and exceptional "is seriously compromising the survival and viability of companies". In addition to ceramics, textiles, chemicals, tanning or even maritime transport are also the sectors most severely affected by current energy prices, they recalled.

At the meeting they also highlighted that there is still "a significant number of companies waiting to receive the approved urgent aid", a situation that the companies already revealed last June and that had accelerated in recent months.

For this reason, the CEV demanded a "greater speed" in the arrival of this aid and that the Government of Spain deploy "urgently exceptional aid", of greater depth and at a level similar to that which neighboring European countries are enabling, a request which was also recently supported by the Valencian president Ximo Puig, who met with the sector on Tuesday.

However, the CEV also slapped the Valencian Government on the ReActiva Plan of the Generalitat Valenciana for gas consuming companies. They ask that the aid that they had proposed before last summer be put into operation and complement the aid offered by the central government.