The Government’s warning to employers has been clear. If it is not added to the agreement to increase the Minimum Interprofessional Wage, the Executive will adopt an increase greater than the 4% that is currently proposed on the table. This morning, before entering the dialogue table with the social agents, the Secretary of State for Employment, Joaquín Pérez Rey, stated it clearly. His proposal for a 4% increase depends on whether the CEOE also joins the agreement. Otherwise, the increase will be higher, although at the moment no figures have been specified. The unions demand 5%.
“If we do not reach an agreement around 4%, if the employers do not agree, the Government will disassociate itself from this figure, and will seek a bipartite agreement that will no longer be able to be at 4%. We are willing to make a more ambitious increase if the employers understand that they cannot support the 4%,” said Pérez Rey, who has justified the Executive’s move because “whoever does not enter into an agreement, pays the consequences of not doing so.”
Furthermore, the Secretary of State has also stated that the indexation of contracts with public administrations, one of the essential conditions of the CEOE, is not proposed at the meeting to join the consensus. It is something that the Ministry of Finance has flatly refused to modify, and that on this occasion, Labor also points out that the employers “have to exercise pragmatism”, that during these years the increase in the SMI is not a surprise, that the intention to equate it with 60% of the average salary was already known, with which companies could already predict what the increases would be.
The Government is in a hurry to decide, and wants to complete the decision process this week, so that the increase in the SMI can be applied retroactively from January 1. Today’s meeting was brief, just over an hour, and another is planned for Thursday or Friday in which the employers’ association is expected to present its position once it has been debated in its governing bodies.
The proposal formulated a few days ago by the Ministry of Labor was an increase of 4%, which would mean going from the current 1,080 euros per month for 14 payments, to 1,123. It remains halfway between the approach of the employers, 3%, and that of the unions, 5%.
At the end of the meeting, the two unions asked the employers for responsibility. “Ask the CEOE for responsibility and to value social dialogue,” said Fernando Luján, deputy general secretary of union policy at UGT; while Mari Cruz Vicente, confederal secretary of Trade Union Action of CCOO. She has declared that “the will of the business organizations for the agreement is lacking. It would be important and would later facilitate the negotiation in the agreements of the affected categories.”
The great obstacle to achieving consensus is the indexation of contracts with public administrations, an element that the CEOE considers vital to avoid having to assume increases in salaries without being able to transfer them to the final price. A request that the unions support. The Ministry of Labor promised to forward the request to the Government, but the response from the Treasury was emphatic. A clear no to allowing this indexation of contracts, this increase in the prices that these companies charge the administration. Therefore, this issue, at least in the short term, is off the table. Not only for practical reasons, it would mean modifying a law which would require more time, but also in substance, such as the opposition of the Ministry of Finance.
The CEOE estimates that there are 1.5 million workers in these companies who work for the administration, and in which salaries represent 60% of total costs. As reported by La Vanguardia, they point out that indexing prices would mean a modest increase for the administration, a total of 750 million per year if the increase were 3%, the majority of which would fall on municipalities and autonomous communities.
Another employer request is 20% bonuses on Social Security contributions for the rural sector. At this point, the unions demand in order to accept it a commitment from the sector to comply with collective agreements and to progress in collective bargaining.
