2023-10-29 02:23:54
The acting Government keeps Parliament firmly closed, but not the negotiating tables outside of lights and stenographers, once again opting for the tactic of fait accompli. This is demonstrated by the latest Government pact signed between PSOE and Sumar, which has surprisingly laid the foundations for what will be the economic, fiscal and labor policy of the next Government chaired by Pedro Sánchez. An Executive that maintains the same tensions and continuous internal clashes that it had in the previous legislature between the ministers of both parties.
The most bitter are those carried out by Nadia Calviño and Yolanda Díaz, first and second vice presidents, who have had a final assault this week, with the coalition pact, after which Calviño seems to be retreating, in a sequence that has been repeated several times. times during the last five years and that they have relapsed now, when the leader of Sumar has once again imposed two new labor measures with the rejection of the head of the Economy: the reduction of the working day and the dismissal reform. In this Calviño he has not even offered great public resistance, as he has done on other occasions, in which he tried to assert his status as President Sánchez’s right-hand man and as guarantor of economic orthodoxy, far from the populism on which the leader of Sumar.
“But one thing is what is signed and another is what arrives or can finally be done,” they explain in those around Calviño, who are clear that these types of measures have to be agreed upon by all parties, including businessmen. «It makes no sense to make a measure that is general in nature without taking into account sectors and companies. This will have to be done in social dialogue, because these are decisions that have to be made in a way that protects productivity and economic growth, so that working conditions but also business margins can continue to be improved,” Calviño said the day after the signature.
But it is clear that Díaz has achieved his objective of reducing the maximum legal working day without a salary reduction to establish it at 37 and a half hours a week progressively, reducing it to 38.5 hours in 2024 and culminating in 2025. «That is black on white,” they say from Sumar.
Regarding the dismissal reform, it has been resumed after being left out of the labor reform. Although the text of the agreement is limited to pointing out that it will “establish guarantees for workers against dismissal, complying with the European Social Charter and reinforcing causality in cases of termination of the employment relationship”, it lays the foundations to tighten the dismissal, something that Calviño has always opposed during the last four years.
Therefore, the signing of the new Government pact of the future Executive chaired by Pedro Sánchez, if the mathematics of the vote gives them the majority in Congress – at the expense of what happens in their opaque negotiations with the independentists of Junts and ERC – has left Of course, the still economic vice president is now thinking more about her more than likely appointment to preside over the European Investment Bank (EIB) than about intensifying her long list of confrontations with Yolanda Díaz, which have been many and, over time, have been decreasing. on the side of Sumar’s leader. Despite this, sources close to the first vice president assure that, before the pact, she showed Sánchez her reluctance to several measures, which could further complicate the tense relationship that the Government maintains with businessmen, and that could definitively break the fine thread. on which hangs the social dialogue table, which, by the way, has not been convened to discuss such important measures.
But, apart from these two points of the agreement in particular, several previous measures already caused more than friction between both ministers and that, now, with Calviño thinking more about his European future than about his homeland, Díaz has taken advantage of it to give impetus to measures that the head of the Economy had stopped. Such is the case of the Scholarship Statute, which Calviño managed to stop in the face of widespread complaints from businessmen and the educational sector due to the impossibility of making it effective in the short term, and which now, if the coalition comes to govern, it will be applied “yes.” or yes”, as Díaz already warned.
Calviño also stopped Díaz’s attempt to turn the Business Margins Observatory into a platform to mark the limits of collective bargaining on business benefits, something the first vice president always opposed. The situation can now change if Calviño does not act as a balance.
Díaz has already managed to get his way in measures as important as the increase in the minimum wage or the rent cap. In the first case, he has managed to raise the SMI by 45% in just three years and has promised that it will reach 60% of the average salary by law. Calviño tried to make this increase softer, so as not to further strain labor costs after the increase in contributions, but Sánchez supported the Minister of Labor. Just like he did with the rent cap and with many points of the labor reform where they clashed. The probable exit to the EIB will end with a fight that the leader of Sumar seems to have won on points, under the arbitration of Sánchez
#Yolanda #Díaz #wins #final #battle #retreating #Calviño