All the ceremonial is ready for the unions to approve the labor reform proposed by the Government this morning. Both CC.OO like the UGT, their governing bodies convene at eleven in the morning and plan to announce the decision around one in the afternoon. And in the afternoon, Minister José Luis Escrivá will detail the initiative to the Toledo Pact commission of the Congress of Deputies.
Although there were some fringes left yesterday afternoon, everything indicates that the two unions will approve the presented project. “Barring a big surprise, we approve it,” said a negotiator. The Ministry of Inclusion also takes the yes of the unions for granted, although it needs to be formalized in these meetings of its highest management bodies.
In this way, both the acceptance of unions and the rejection of employers are reaffirmed. Yesterday, the president of the CEOE, Antonio Garamendi, raised the tone by stating that the Government has presented the pension reform debate as if it were “lentils”, “stealing the debate” and the negotiation from the parties and without a financial report to assess the effects of the proposal.
In this way, Garamendi contradicts the Minister of Inclusion and Social Security, José Luis Escrivá, who stated that the employer has not submitted any proposals. “We have proposed things, but we have not been given data… It is very difficult to talk about something without numbers and the reality is that today we do not have the economic memory of the reform… The minister is not telling the truth” , declared the president of the CEOE.
There are two major attacks that the pension reform proposal has suffered since the project came to light: that it puts all the weight on an increase in social contributions and that it is not a sustainable model. The employer especially insists on the first point, on the increase in contributions due to the elimination of the maximum pension limit, the increase in the intergenerational equity mechanism (MEI) and the creation of a quota of solidarity on high incomes. “Call it what you want, but I think it’s a full-fledged cut in rights”, pointed out yesterday the president of the Self-Employed Workers’ Association (ATA), who added that he supposes that “twenty million citizens will pay more taxes, we will work more years to collect less pensions”.
Both Fedea and BBVA Research believe that it will need extra income. For Fedea, it will have a high and growing basic deficit in the coming decades, and for BBVA Research the measures imply an increase in spending above 3.5 points of GDP, while revenues move in a fork between 0 .8 and 1.7 points.
However, what Escrivá has achieved is the endorsement of Brussels, which always takes the final result into account, and leaves room for formulas to reach this goal, whether through cuts or extra income . The first manifestations of the European Commissioner for the Economy, Paolo Gentiloni, were to highlight the “positive spirit” of the negotiation, although without pronouncing on the substance.
