Difficulties in finding workers and difficulties in covering sick leave, which are numerous because the work is demanding, poorly paid and the hours can clearly be improved. The Generalitat's collaborating or concerted residences do not know how to recruit people, they declare themselves in an extreme situation and demand – employers and allied unions – a salary equalization with the public residential and health sectors. They calculate that between the public residence agreement and the main application agreements in the sector there is a differential of 47%.
“Same job, same salary” is the statement of a manifesto written by social and business organizations in the sector of care for the elderly. The possible increases in the rates of the concerted residences that the Generalitat's budgets should contain have been left up in the air due to the rejection of the accounts and the electoral call and these agents want all the electoral programs to address their problems. “The situation is very serious,” says Ramon Massaguer, general director of the Puigvert Foundation and secretary of the board of directors of the employers' association La Unió (Associació d'Entitats Sanitàries i Socials).
“There are very important differences in labor agreements regarding remuneration and working conditions between, for example, a nurse in the health sector compared to the same nurse in the social sector in a residence,” explains Massaguer. The same occurs with geriatricians, nursing assistants or cleaning staff, who complete the most common professional profiles of residences. “The same training, the same qualifications and qualifications, but when push comes to shove the social sector finds great difficulties in hiring. “Professionals migrate to sectors with better conditions.”
Logical: a geriatric assistant works 1,792 hours in the public sector to earn a gross annual salary of 16,384.30 euros, while the same professional, in a public residence (a very minority percentage of all establishments), works less (1,633 hours ) and earns much more (24,375.82 euros). “We are in a very extreme situation. If it is not fixed, the residences will begin to suffer from the lack of professionals and the flight to other sectors.”
Social agents estimate the cost of pay equalization at around 282 million euros per year. To this amount another 93 million must be added to balance the length of working days. In total 375 million.
The staff of nursing homes in Catalonia amounts to around 40,000 professionals, of which 90% are women. “We see with great concern how the interprofessional minimum wage is trapping certain profiles that are as necessary as the geriatric assistant, the professional who takes care of the day-to-day needs of the elderly, a job of great value but of little social recognition. ", states the manifesto, which regrets that the long working hours, including weekends, turn the sector into "a very unattractive employment option, at the bottom of the social sector."
"We are desperate, we do not understand how the Administration does not put money for the solutions", exclaims Cinta Pascual, president of the Catalan Association of Assistance Resources (ACRA). The entities demand an immediate extraordinary investment of 250 million and to implement salary equalization between the professionals of the concerted and those of the Generalitat within the maximum term of a legislature.
