The general secretary of the union, Pepe Álvarez, announces in Murcia that he will ask the Government for another review of the SMI
The general secretary of the UGT, Pepe Álvarez, warned the Spanish Confederation of Business Organizations (CEOE) this Friday that if it does not “react” and increase wages to guarantee the purchasing power of workers in the face of galloping inflation, “there will be conflict ». “It is about making the employers aware that, if they do not want potatoes to go to the Council of Ministers, it is time to sit down to negotiate,” he said during a visit to the Region of Murcia.
Asked about the type of mobilizations that the union foresees, Álvarez replied that “demonstrations, strikes of days, of hours, indefinite.” “It will depend on the capacity of the workers in each sector to carry out the mobilization process,” he commented in this regard.
“We are in the midst of blocking collective bargaining in the country as a whole,” lamented the general secretary of the UGT. In fact, he explained that “collective agreements only advance” in the cases of “serious companies.” This would be the case of the Seat agreement, which is going to be signed in the next few days and which “includes an increase in salaries that improves purchasing power because it has a salary guarantee clause and, in addition, it reviews the year 2021 with a 6.5% increase of what the agreement of the previous year had foreseen».
Antonio Jiménez denounces the high occupational accident rate in the Region, with 120 accidents a day last year
He also cited as examples of good practices the unblocking of the Cantabria metal agreement “after 20 days of strike and that, effectively, will maintain the purchasing power of wages.” On the other hand, he affirmed that, at the moment, “there is a serious conflict in Álava with the metal agreement”.
The UGT leader stated that wages “are not to blame for inflation.” On the contrary, he warned that the workers are “the pagans” of this price increase. “In no case, no one can say that, with the salary increases we have had in the last year and in the last few months, we workers are the ones who caused this situation of inflation.”
Therefore, Álvarez believes that “you cannot ask for more from salaries”, but that remunerations “must have increases that are related to the increase in the cost of living in Spain.” In addition, he warned that the unions are not going to give up “any other possibility.” For example, he advances that the UGT is going to ask the central government for “a review of the Interprofessional Minimum Wage (SMI) in September”, since “the law not only allows it, but also provides for it.”
“Block” in the Region
For his part, the general secretary of the UGT in the Region of Murcia, Antonio Jiménez, warned that the situation of collective bargaining in the Community is “blocked”, because there are 40 sectoral collective agreements to resolve, affecting 233,000 people . This situation of blockage joins some “very important accident rates” in the Region. And it is that, according to Jiménez, last year there were 120 work accidents per day.
#UGT #threatens #Murcia #mobilizations #salaries #equated #inflation