About to complete three years of the strike that closed the metal industry of Cádiz for nine long days of protests and riot chargesunions and employers are negotiating a new collective agreement to replace the one that put an end to that labor conflict, one of the largest in recent times in Spain. At the moment, no one has brought the war drums out of the closet after several meetings and exchanges of proposals. The increase of the workload In the shipyards it has greatly reduced unrest in a sector that employs thousands of people in one of the provinces with the most unemployment. But everything is still to be decided.
The metal of Cádiz is not just any economic sector. It is the most important in that province -only surpassed by services-, which gives employment to about 30,000 people in hundreds of auxiliary companies of the large shipping and aeronautical construction companies installed in various locations in the Bay of Cadiz. In November 2021, workers at that strategic sector in the southwest of Spain they went on a war footing to demand better salaries and jobs which the employers flatly refused, until, after nine days of strike, they agreed to sign a new collective agreement with the CCOO and UGT unions.
The validity of the agreement expired in December, but its termination clause ultraactivity It is valid for two more years, until a new one is signed. And, for now, almost a year of this ultra-activity has already been spent without there having been an agreement, or even a rapprochement, between employers and unions to seal an agreement to replace the one that ended the 2021 strike. The negotiations began in June, but some union organizations believe that everything it goes very slowmainly due to the refusal of employers to accede to their requests for new labor and salary improvements. CCOO even ventures that the agreement will be “complicated.”
The latest thing that CCOO, UGT and the Federation of Metal Entrepreneurs of the province of Cádiz (FEMCA) have closed is a calendar of meetings until the end of the year, in which they will study various proposals on salary increaseswork hours, bonuses, hiring and other labor aspects. “Right now the intention is to reach an agreement. Then we’ll see what happens,” he tells Public the general secretary of the UGT Industry Federation in Cádiz, Antonio Montoro.
Until now, the points of approach have been minima between both parties. According to the head of Industry Communication at CCOO in Cádiz, Pedro Lloret, of the nine points included in the platform that was delivered to FEMCA when they began to negotiate, only one has had no discrepancies: it is the one that sets the minimum wage by agreement. , which was already included in the previous one. “Any salary increase above the CPI they put their hands on their heads. They are – says Lloret – in a position that seems very marked by Garamendi”, the president of the Spanish Confederation of Business Organizations (CEOE).
Discontinuous permanent fixtures monopolize the sector
The regulation of the figure of discontinuous permanent positions is one of the great workhorses in this negotiation. According to CCOO, 73% of new contracts that are now made in the metal sector of Cádiz are fixed discontinuous, a figure that reinforced the labor reform of 2021 as an alternative to temporary contracts for work and service with many fewer guarantees for workers and without an indefinite nature.
Pedro Lloret explains to Public that the discontinuous fixed parts of metal are not the same as those of hospitality or services such as cleaning schools, where there is an established work season that allows a hiring calendar to be made. For this reason, he specifies, they require specific regulation in the sector’s collective agreement. “Here – he adds – there are workers who come and go 20 times a yearwho work for a day or a week and then leave. What we want is for there to be a minimum of months with a contract and for you to know in the stock market when they are going to call you. “That everything is clearer and that there is no uncertainty.”
The Coordinator of Metal Workers (CTM) has a similar opinion, a union that does not participate in the negotiation table of the collective agreement, but that increasingly has more members and followers in the Cadiz auxiliary industry. This union organization ensures that many businessmen in this sector ““they are playing”for their own benefit, with the figure of the discontinuous permanent contract, whose regulation, in their opinion, must be improved to avoid abuses.
“This works like this: you have a staff of one hundred workers for fifty jobs. You have the remaining fifty in the bench and they use them when it suits you. They play with them, because there are many people waiting. And the point is that they skip the order of call and that it is used for other reasons, not because of the workload,” explains one of the CTM spokespersons, Diego Rodríguez.
The image of the bench is also used by Pedro Lloret, from CCOO: “The discontinuous fixtures have become a very expensive bench which is very cheap for the employers. “They are misusing them,” he says. In his opinion, the use of this type of contracts, their duration and the selection criteria in the stock market should be clearly defined.
The employer wants to collect the reduction in working hours from the worker
Apart from the always thorny issue of salary increases and maintaining the purchasing power With the increases in the CPI, the length of the working day is another of the issues that has already caused important differences in the negotiation of the new Cádiz metal collective agreement, especially as a result of the Government’s proposal to progressively reduce it by law to 37.5 hours per week, flatly rejected by the CEOE.
In September, UGT already warned that the metal employers’ association defended that the reduction in working hours should “come out of the worker’s pocket”, that is, that a decrease of the hours worked would entail the perception of a lower salary. But that union is very clear about its position on the matter: “the working day will be what the law stipulates. There are things that are non-negotiable. The law must always be complied with. The law is not negotiated,” emphasizes Antonio Montoro.
In the opinion of CCOO, it is also unfeasible for employers to claim that the reduction in working hours comes out of the effort of the worker. “They are betting on becoming stronger there, that this issue does not appear in the agreements. We are going to see what happens in the meetings that we have scheduled until the end of the year,” warns Lloret.
The position of the businessmen at the start of the negotiations does not suggest, at least for CCOO, a happy ending, for now. “From what is being seen with the CEOE, it is going to be difficult for us to reach a proper agreement. It’s going to be difficult to get it quicklybecause the employers’ discourse from three years ago has returned,” predicts their spokesperson in the Industry Federation.
The Federation of Metal Entrepreneurs of Cádiz, FEMCA, has not responded to this newspaper’s questions about the progress of the negotiations and the content of its proposals to agree on a new collective agreement in a strategic economic sector of that province and of the entire province. the Andalusian autonomous community.
The slowness of the negotiations in Cádiz contrasts, however, with what happened in the neighboring Sevillewhere the same unions signed at the end of October the agreement with the Seville employers’ association FEDEME for the new collective agreement of the metal sector in that province, from which a total of 88,720 workers from 7,222 companies will benefit until 2026, with a salary increase set between 9 and 13%, depending on the evolution of the CPI.
The new Sevillian metal agreement has replaced the one signed by unions and employers in November 2021, almost at the same time as the agreement that ended the strike in Cádiz, and which, as in the case of the Cádiz strike, expired in December 2023. .
Changes in the sector since the strike
Since the agreement that ended the strike was signed three years ago, something has changed in the Cádiz metal sector. For example, according to the CTM, the breaches of the agreement, among other reasons, because workers have acquired greater awareness and report irregularities committed in greater numbers.
Diego Rodríguez assures that they process an average of a hundred complaints a year against companies that fail to comply with the sector’s collective agreement in aspects related to overtimethe summer day or contracts. “We have improved somewhat in respect for our rights,” admits the Coordinator’s spokesperson.
Lloret, from CCOO, also sees some improvements compared to 2021, but not many, because, in his opinion, the job insecurity of the labor of subcontractors that work for large shipbuilding companies.
What has changed to a greater extent is the volume of the workloada fundamental aspect to understand the tranquility with which a sector so convulsed three years ago, when the shipyards operated at half throttle, or less, and job prospects were very unflattering. The situation has changed in such a way that the first vice president of the Government and Minister of Finance, María Jesús Montero, has gone so far as to affirm this year that the workload of the Navantia shipyards In the province of Cádiz it is guaranteed “until 2030”, an employment forecast so long that, he noted, it had “never” occurred in the Bay.
The truth is that the shipyards of the city of Cádiz are repairing a large number of cruise ships, to the point that they have had a lack of space and personnel to meet all the demand. AND in those of San Fernandowhile building a patrol boat for the navy Morocco 87 meters in length that requires one million hours of work, the workload for five years has been guaranteed with the order of two hydrographic vessels for the Spanish navy, while a second contract is being negotiated with the Saudi Arabia to build five more ships.
In the shipyards of Puerto RealHowever, job prospects are more uncertain, after the company has opted for the construction of offshore wind platforms as the main activity, to the detriment of boating. The plenary session of the Puerto Rican City Council had to rule a few months ago in favor of the continuity of shipbuilding defended by the Navantia business committee in that Cadiz town, which had denounced a “lack of interest on the part of the company in obtaining contracts that promote civil naval construction”.
The PP of Cádiz has also requested that the guarantee of the workload until 2030 provided by the Government ensure imminent form with closed and signed contracts so that it does not remain a simple advertisement. “If this is not the case, the plants will be left without workload and will go into underactivity, which will have an impact on job destruction in the auxiliary sector,” the popular formation has warned.
For now, the greater workload in the shipyards has meant, according to the CTM, an improvement in working conditions, at least in the most qualified positions. Due to the greater demand for employment, there are fewer workers at the doors of companies waiting for a contract and, as a consequence, employers must comply with what the agreement stipulates so as not to be left without qualified labor. “The tables have turned,” says Diego Rodríguez.
Antonio Montoro, from UGT, does not classify the current situation of metal in the province of Cádiz as either good or bad. He summarizes that there are no large orders in the naval sector, but there are in the aeronautical sector, which there are expectations of more workload than in other years and that everything is “relatively calm”, waiting for the results of the meetings scheduled with the employers until the end of the year.
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