Amparo has been running a hairdressing salon in the city of Valencia for 32 years and explains that she started with three people on staff. In the pandemic, due to circumstances, she fired the employee she had left and now she takes on all the work by herself. She also does it with some physical difficulties, since she wears a girdle to alleviate her back problems. She also with some economic ones, since she also perceives that the market has not recovered after Covid.
That is argued by the hairdressing sector as a whole that this Monday has moved its protest to the streets of Valencia. In front of the headquarters of the PSP-PSOE they have claimed the return to reduced VAT for the sector, which they lost in the previous economic crisis. "We want them to give us back what was ours, not to give it to us, but we had 8% and they have not returned it to us.
The PSOE presented the NLP so that they would lower it for us, but now that it is in power, it does not want to return it to us," summarizes Pamela De Diego, spokesperson for the personal image platform Creer en Nosotros that participated in the protest this Monday. A similar protest had also been scheduled in Lleida today.
They call it "The Rebellion of the Broken Scissors" and this Monday in Valencia they have been convened by the Valencia Hairdressing and Beauty Guild, federations and associations of the Business Alliance for the Lowering of VAT on Personal Image. They argue that there is a "very serious situation" for SMEs and the self-employed in the sector, as they continue to suffer a drop in turnover after the pandemic of around 25%.
It is one of the figures that they have collected in the report that they also present to reinforce the demands made by the sector and that highlights not only the difficulties due to the energy crisis or the impact of inflation on its customers, but also shows a portrait of a particularly feminized sector.
In the Valencian Community, 91.11% of entrepreneurs and freelancers in the personal image sector are women and only 8.89% are men. The average age in the sector is 48.44 years and with 24.54 years of professional experience. Anabel, for example, enters the average. She opened her business 13 years ago in Valencia and she doesn't see this as a good time.
Nor is he optimistic about the VAT request, which he supports but "they won't give us because they believe this is a luxury." He looks at the bar next to his small neighborhood hairdresser to point out that "if people have 20 euros, they spend it on a beer and buy the dye at the supermarket." She already spent time in confinement because her establishments were closed, but now she says "this keeps happening".
The report presented today by the sector shows that 96.67% of businesswomen and the self-employed consider that the refund of the reduced VAT would help to alleviate the comparative tax damage with other sectors that were also raised in 2012, and that it is already have recovered.
"Since 2019, the drop in billing is very large, many people have had to close. Now, the electricity has also gone up and we cannot raise prices because otherwise people will not be able to pay them. We earn to pay, we do not earn to live", insists Pamela De Diego, whose platform supports a rally that plans 40 new rallies in front of the PSOE headquarters throughout Spain to express her "indispensable" will to maintain this claim for as long as necessary.
