After more than a year of tough negotiations, unions and employers finally put the finishing touch to the V Agreement for Employment and Collective Bargaining (AENC), which will mean the biggest wage increase for Spanish workers in recent decades. Now they have another complicated task ahead of them: that of unblocking the almost 1,400 agreements that are pending updating, some even expired for years.
But this Wednesday was a day for celebration. Visibly proud and with prolonged applause, the general secretaries of CC OO and UGT, Unai Sordo and Pepe Álvarez, and the presidents of CEOE and Cepyme, Antonio Garamendi and Gerardo Cuerva, respectively, signed the pact reached by surprise last Friday and which recommends salary increases of 4% in 2023 and 3% for both 2024 and 2025, with a salary review clause that, in the event of a deviation from inflation, could imply additional increases of up to 1% for each of those years , which would be applied at the beginning of the following financial year and not retroactively.
The act was held in the Círculo de Bellas Artes, a neutral place, and, unlike the last agreement, without the presence of any member of the Government. The employers imposed this condition because they did not want them to appropriate –less than before the start of the electoral campaign- an achievement that –as they stressed- only corresponds to them.
“Here there is no veto by anyone or against anyone,” Garamendi stressed. But he did specify that “we want to value bipartite social dialogue, without Adamism, since we have been making agreements that are good for the country for 45 years.” The Government, although physically absent, was very present at this act, since the employers took the opportunity to send various messages to it. First of all, that it stop intervening in labor regulations that affect companies and workers. «I demand the bipartite dialogue. Any issue that affects labor relations must be dealt with beforehand at the social dialogue table,” claimed the general secretary of Cepyme. Along the same lines, Garamendi attacked the observatory announced by the Government to control the benefits of companies. “We do not share everything that is intervention if it is for the Government to tell us what to do,” he denounced.
And, secondly, the businessmen asked the Executive to follow their example and bet on giving certainty to the country. “This agreement generates certainty, which is the first step towards what we are looking for: stability. Hopefully it will also be done in politics,” Cuerva wished.
“We are not giving up increases in 2022”
The greatest desire of the unions is that this “important and ambitious agreement”, which “will allow not only maintaining but improving purchasing power, allow” speeding up “the negotiation of the nearly 1,400 stuck agreements, some of which have expired for five or ten years, as denounced Álvarez. “This agreement gives hope that we can solve this in a short time,” he remarked, since he made it clear that although it is not mandatory, “it does not mean that it does not have to be applied.”
Sordo, for his part, stressed that, although the year 2022 is finally left out -at the express requirement of the CEOE-, “they do not give up increases” retroactively for last year and previous years. “Now it’s time to negotiate the agreements where 2022 can be included and this agreement remarkably oxygenates those negotiations,” said the CC OO leader.
The unions valued the importance of having managed to include a review clause with inflation -something that was a red line for the employers-, although in the end it has remained at a maximum additional increase of 1% per year, which can raise wages from now to 2025 more than 13.5% if it were to have to be applied in this three-year period.
In addition, they folded sails with the employers and already ruled out linking wages with margins. In this sense, they positioned themselves that if an observatory is finally created to control the benefits of companies, that it be only as “a process of transparency”, but it remains outside of wages.
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