With May 1 in sight, and with no prospect of a salary agreement with the employers in sight, the unions warn that, if there are no news very soon, they will launch a process of intense mobilizations in the second part of the year.
“The bosses have gotten up from the table. There are no counterproposals”, affirms the general secretary of the UGT, Pepe Álvarez. “Social dialogue is not going to social gatherings, getting together to talk. It is about negotiating, and the CEOE is characterized by not making any proposal in all the negotiation processes”, stresses Unai Sordo, from CC.OO. It is the confirmation with which the unions focus on May 1, the date they set as the limit to verify if the CEOE shows willingness to negotiate the renewal of the Agreement for Employment and Collective Bargaining (AENC). Not the case, for the moment.
In any case, CC.OO. and UGT will wait until that day to make a decision and prepare the mobilizations. A May 1 in which, under the motto "raise wages, lower prices, distribute benefits", 73 demonstrations have been called throughout Spain.
They are demonstrations to put pressure on the employers, although the prospects of a possible agreement are minimal and with which, the announced mobilizations are more likely. The unions do not specify details of how they will be carried out, they only point out that they will be generalized in the different sectors, and they are accompanied by a notice. "We know how mobilizations start, but not how they end," both Sordo and Álvarez pointed out, and when asked if the phrase in question was a threat, they stated that it was a finding, that you never know how protests can ignite in society .
In this sense, they mentioned the strong response to the pension reform in France, pointing out that it can also respond to other discomforts in addition to the specific one of retirement. "That it should not be taken as a threat, or as a warning, it is about verifying a reality that can be lived in our country," said Álvarez.
The unions have also lamented that the CEOE's position could end up burying the AENC, an instrument that they consider very useful due to its role as a reference in the different collective agreements that are being negotiated, and which includes many other aspects, in addition to the purely salary.
So much discrepancy between unions and employers in the last year contrasts with the multitude of agreements that were signed during the pandemic. In this field, Sordo considers that one of the reasons for the current disagreement, in addition to the electoral cycle, is that during the pandemic what there was was a great injection of public resources and that instead, now it is a question of distributing the cost of the war of Ukraine between wages, margins and public resources. "When this is about not everything being paid for by public resources and the salaries of the people, the employers are erased from the general agreement," said Sordo.
