Employers and unions will meet next Monday March 13 to try to solve it in the afternoon agreement fees and so on collective bargaining during the current price crisis. This was confirmed by sources from the Prensa Ibérica group to EL PERIÓDICO DE CATALUNYA, both from the employers’ association and from the trade unions. Negotiations were interrupted in May of last year due to the impossibility of an agreement. After 10 months and eight days, social workers will sit at the same table and try to redirect the Labor and Collective Bargaining Agreement (AENC). A kind of ‘deal agreement’ which then serves as a reference for negotiators of each sector, thus facilitating the renewal of agreements in each union under common criteria and minimizing the possibility of strikes and disagreements.
Informal contacts over the past few weeks have borne fruit and CEOE will sit with CCOO And UGT to talk about salaries. The centers took a step forward last week and made public their initial proposals to kickstart negotiations. Wages must increase by at least 13.25% over the next three years, and then add to that figure a series of bonuses linked to the benefits of each sector and inflation. This is the starting point on the union side and should be reiterated from Monday by employers who have so far been prudent to link wages to price development through clauses, although they have not been unequivocally opposed.
Collective bargaining has been going on since 2021 without consensual reference, guided by the correlation of the strengths of companies and workers in each industry. What contributed to highlighting inequalities between unions last year and leading to greater gender inequality, because less organized sectors agree that they are more feminine. According to CCOO de Catalunya’s calculations, 70% of the workers with the lowest wage growth last year were women.
First the pandemic and then the strong rise in prices made it difficult for employers and unions to renew the last AENC (which ended in 2021). The CPI skyrocketed to coincide with the start of the war in Ukraine, and most industry deals have since been closed with salary increases below it. What caused 2022 to end with the biggest loss of purchasing power for workers since 1985, when the Department of Labor began compiling the first figures for collective agreements? Currently, these 2023 initial contracts signed in January have posted an average salary increase of 2.8% compared to a 5.9% CPI in the same month.
The government asks the social partners to reach an agreement.
They are putting pressure on social intermediaries from the government to try to reactivate AENC and agree on how to distribute the costs of the price hike. In particular, the second vice president and minister of labor, Yolanda Diazrallied its ranks with the power plants and criticized the CEOE’s negotiating position for weeks. “The unions defend the general interests of this country. […] Increase salaries,” he told reporters last week.
Social agents decided to break the negotiations in May last year, considering that an agreement was not possible. The unions then proposed a 3.5% salary increase for 2022, added to a salary review clause that would automatically equalize the salary increase to current inflation at the end of the year. Something employers flatly denied because it could mean, for example, an 8% increase in salaries during the first year of the contract.
Now in centerstemperate” And “comfortable“They cease to equate positioning and wages exactly to inflation, in terms used by the centers themselves. And they propose to create objective indicators that assess how much profit margins companies in different industries have at any given time. The more they earn, the more they pay their employees.
The factories set and set a deadline of two months to negotiate the new AENC. first day of may. Otherwise, they threaten to pressure the Government to increase corporate tax and thus tax it more. At this time, the Executive has not made a decision on this.