Employers and unions have met next Monday March 13 in the afternoon to try to unravel the salary agreement and order like this Collective negotiation during the current price crisis. This is confirmed to EL PERIÓDICO by sources from both the employers’ association and the unions. Negotiations were suspended in May of last year due to the impossibility of an agreement, 10 months and eight days later the social agents will sit down at the same table to try to redirect the Agreement for Employment and Collective Bargaining (AENC). A kind of ‘agreement of agreements’ that later serves as a reference for the negotiators of each sector and thus facilitate the renewal of the agreements in each union, under common criteria and minimizing the possibility of strikes and disagreements.
The informal contacts of the last few weeks have borne fruit and the CEOE will sit down with CCOO and UGT to talk about salaries. The centrals already made a move last week and made public their starting proposal to start the talks. Wages must rise a minimum of 13.25% in the next three years, in addition to later adding to that figure a series of bonuses linked to the benefits of each sector and to inflation. That is the starting point of the trade union side, which must be replicated starting Monday by the employers, who until now have been wary -if not firmly opposed- to link wages to the evolution of prices through clauses.
The employers, for their part, held an internal conclave this Monday to study the union proposal, establish a position and develop their own. “In the internal meeting held today at CEOE, the unions’ proposal for a new AENC has been analyzed and the lines that could form a counter-proposal by CEOE have been discussed,” say sources from the business entity.
Collective bargaining has been going on since 2021 without consensual reference, guided since then by the correlation of forces of companies and workers in each sector. What in the last year has contributed to accentuate the inequalities between unions and resulting in greater gender inequality, since those less organized sectors agree that they are those that are more feminized. According to calculations by the CCOO de Catalunya, 70% of the workers with the lowest wage increases during the last year were women.
The pandemic, first, and the strong growth in prices, later, have made it difficult for employers and unions to renew the last AENC (expired in 2021). The CPI skyrocketed coinciding with the start of the war in Ukraine and most of the sectoral agreements have been closed since then with salary increases below it. What has led to the fact that 2022 ended with the greatest loss of purchasing power for workers since 1985, when the Ministry of Labor began to compile the first figures for collective agreements. At the moment, this 2023 the first agreements signed in January registered an average salary increase of 2.8%, compared to a CPI in that same month of 5.9%.
The Government asks the social partners to agree
From the Government they have been pressuring the social agents to try to reactivate the AENC and agree on how to distribute the costs of the price escalation. Specifically, the second vice president and labor minister, Yolanda Diaz, has closed ranks with the power plants and has spent weeks criticizing the CEOE’s negotiating position. “The unions are defending the general interest of this country. […] Raise wages,” he said last week, to questions from journalists.
The social agents decided to break negotiations in May of last year considering that the agreement was not possible. Then the unions proposed a 3.5% salary increase for 2022, added to a salary review clause that would automatically equate the salary increase to existing inflation at the end of the year. Something that the employers flatly rejected, since this would have meant ending up assuming, for example, salary increases of the order of 8% during the first year of validity of the agreement.
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Now the centrals have “moderate” and “relaxed“, according to the terms used by the centrals themselves, their positioning and they renounce fully equating wages to inflation. And they propose creating objective indicators that evaluate what profit margin the companies in the different sectors have at any given time, so that those that the more they earn, the more they pay their employees.
The plants have set a period of two months to negotiate the new AENC, setting as the deadline the First of May. If not, they threaten to put pressure on the Government to increase corporate tax and thus further tax corporate profits. At the moment the Executive has not ruled on this issue.