The Russian invasion of the Ukraine leaves its echoes felt even at the negotiating tables of the unions and employers’ associations in Spain. Social dialogue sources confirm to this newspaper that the beginning of the war adds urgency to the negotiation of the new State Collective Bargaining Agreement (AENC), the document that establishes the general lines that guide the negotiators of the thousands of agreements in the country, also in terms of wages. The possibility that the war will cause electricity to rise, electricity will push up other prices, and prices will give rise to demands for strong increases in wages is what makes it imperative that the negotiation is not prolonged, they say.
“If the deal is not done before the end of march, I see it very difficult for us to close it & rdquor ;, explains one of the negotiators. “With the war going on, each IPC data can be higher than the previous one, and that will distort the possibilities of agreement. Closing it soon is the only way to give companies and workers peace of mind, with wage increases that everyone finds reasonable & rdquor ;, he concludes. The latest CPI data, corresponding to January, marks price increases of 6.1% year-on-year. At the moment, neither CEOE nor CCOO have indicated what figure for wage increases they are proposing, while UGT has already put on the table an increase of 5% this year; the first negotiating meeting will be on Thursday, March 3; two days before, on the 1st, the unions will meet with each other to try to agree on a common position.
Prices and labor reform
In principle, unions and employers planned to give themselves until the end of this semester to be able to negotiate without haste an agreement with a time horizon of three years validity, but everyone already agrees that this schedule -agreed at a preliminary meeting at the end of January – is obsolete. Not only because of the conflict in Eastern Europe; The labor reform also has a lot to do with it, they explain from the employers’ association: as the weeks have gone by since its approval, at the end of last year, gaps and inconcretions in this new norm have been revealed that should be amended with agreements, they say, before they give rise to a cascade of claims in court. In the opinion of the businessmen, these arrangements would have to be arranged before the end of March, which is when the most far-reaching part of the reform comes into force, the one referring to the new contracting formulas. So both inflation, as well as the shortcomings of regulation, as well as the need to adjust the covid erte (recently extended until March 31) with the model proposed in the labor reform push the social partners to think of an agreement in weeks. , and not in months.
Despite this coincidence in the need to shorten the terms, the negotiations are not expected to be easy: CEOE has shown reluctant to raise wages because it says that it is necessary to avoid “that the increases in prices and wages feed off each other”, while the UGT and CCOO have repeatedly insisted that there must be notable increases, especially after a 2021 loss of purchasing power, because the Last year, wages in the agreement rose by 1.5% while average inflation rose to 3.1%.
There is no consensus on the rest of the matters to be discussed either: for the unions it is a priority to complete the provisions of the labor reform in terms of discontinuous fixed contracts, which is the formula called to replace a good part of the temporary hiring that was given until now but that with the new law is prohibited or restricted. The employers also want to address this contractual figure, but they will also propose resolving the inconcretions in subcontracting or the conversion of the old temporary contracts to the new ones, something less pressing for the plants.
CEOE also has an additional reason to mend the labor reform that does not affect its interlocutors, according to sources close to the management: at the end of the year employer electionsand its president, Antonio Garamendi, is in the best interest of a favorable pact -and soon- to shore up his chances of re-election, before his potential opponents (none of them have yet stepped forward) can use the failures of the reform that he signed to campaign against him.
Unions and employers have condemned the Russian attack on Ukraine with statements calling for an end to the violence and expressing solidarity with the victims of the war. The texts have, yes, different accents: CEOE points only to Moscow, while the centrals speak of an escalation that has among its causes “[tanto] the interventionist policies of the United States and Russia” (UGT) or “an expansive policy of NATO” (CCOO), among others.
The employers also dedicate more space in their text to the announced EU sanctions against Russia, which they claim to understand, although they recall that “it is the companies that will suffer the impact of these economic sanctions, including companies that trade and operate in Russia” , and for this reason they ask for “maximum clarity and transparency” when they are adopted.