Four out of 10 Catalan workers He has been with him for at least a year. salary frozen. The price of the shopping basket rises -more than 13% in the last year-, the mortgage rises -for those who have it at a variable rate-, gasoline rises, but what does not rise for 1.2 million employees Catalans is the salary. And it is that the collective bargaining tables between employers and unions have been bogged down since the start of the pandemic and this year, with prices skyrocketing, they have hardly made any progress. What is on the way to certifying an ‘annus horribilis’ for the purchasing power of working households.
The absence of an agreement causes the pockets of almost half of the Catalan working population to directly suffer the bite of inflation in their purchasing power. And those salaries that do rise, do so well below prices. Given this, BCC y UGT They are finalizing a large demonstration in Madrid that will kick off a cascade of sectoral mobilizations to try to drag the employers to agreements.
A total of 77 agreements, whether provincial, regional or state, are blocked in Catalan lands and affect 1.2 million workers, with a somewhat higher incidence among women than among men, according to data compiled by CCOO. From metal in Barcelona -one of the most important agreements in all of Spain-, to temporary employment agencies (ETT), passing through the bread industries in Girona or wood and cork in Lleida.
“The purchasing power lost this year will no longer be recovered, no matter what happens”, acknowledged the general secretary of the CCOO of Catalonia, Xavier Pacheco, in a meeting with journalists. The agreements that are expiring continue to rise and are added to the long list of blocked negotiations. Next year it is expected that another 113 agreements will be added, affecting another 750,000 Catalan employees.
The sectors in latent conflict accumulate and, for the time being, the leadership of CEOE, BCC y UGT They do not find a date to meet again to unclog the situation. Sources from the three entities confirm to EL PERIÓDICO that there are informal talks to try to reactivate the salary agreement negotiations that broke down last May. But, at the moment, these contacts do not crystallize in a formal call with a date and time. The call for elections this November in the CEOE makes great progress difficult, despite the fact that publicly there are business sectors -such as Foment del Treball- that urge to reconvene the tables.
“imaginative” formulas
The dispute between including or not including salary review clauses is the key to the negotiations for the salary agreement. “It is very important that the negotiations be reactivated, otherwise the conflict is served. Neither the companies can accept to increase wages at the level of the CPI, nor can they offer rises of 1 or 2%”, affirms the director of labor relations of Foment of treball, Javier Ibars. At the moment the few agreements that are renewed are signed at an average of 2,6%an increase 42% lower than what salaries are rising in the rest of Europe.
Meanwhile, the tables explore”imaginative solutions”, an adjective shared by employer and union negotiators. “We are offering improvements in conciliation or permits, also the commitment not to absorb or compensate bonuses with salary increases… We are even studying some type of limited and partial indexation in some agreements,” explains Ibars. “In the company agreements, where we know if the companies are making money or not, we are making more progress, but in the sectoral ones it is being impossible”, points out the Secretary for Trade Union Policy of the UGT of Catalonia, Núria Gilgado.
hot autumn
The centrals threaten to break the social peace that has reigned until now and begin to escalate the conflict from the end of September or the beginning of October. “We are not going to be the pagans of this crisis, […] the corporate irresponsibility it is enormous and it is they, with their profits, who have caused this second round of price inflation”, declared Pacheco.
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The leche today it is 25.6% more expensive than a year ago; the oil 24%; the eggs 22.4%, the pan 15.2%… The largest increase in the shopping basket in four decades comes with relatively low levels of labor conflict. Until May, latest data recorded by the Department of Labor and just the month in which the negotiations between employers and unions for a salary agreement broke down, there had been a total of 50 strikes in Catalonia, in which 34,058 workers had participated and in which a total of 825,009 hours had been lost. of day.
The level of incidence of strikes was 10,7%, that is, of 100 workers summoned to the protests, only 10.7 had supported them. It is the second lowest level of incidence in the last five years in Catalonia and is far from the levels of conflict resulting from the 2008 crisis. However, from the CCOO and the UGT they are finalizing movements to reverse these data and shake up the street this fall.