The general secretary of CCOO, Unai Sordo, warned this Monday that the organization will not sign with the Government the agreement for a new increase in the Minimum Interprofessional Wage (SMI) if the Executive does not comply with the commitments it has made with the trade union confederations regarding the reform of the rules of wage compensation and absorption.
In an interview with Europa Press, Sordo stressed that, despite the proposal from the Ministry of Labour to raise the SMI by 5.3% and exempt it from taxation, the union will not give its approval unless there are firm guarantees that the compensation rules will be modified.
"We already said that we were not going to sign a new increase in the SMI if it did not involve the execution of what we already agreed in the last one and that was signed by President Pedro Sánchez himself on compensation and absorption, and we are in those terms," the union leader reiterated.
Sordo also emphasized that there continues to be a relevant difference between the Labour proposal to raise the SMI by 5.3% through 2027 and the trade unions' demand to place the increase at 7%, so that "it does not contemplate changes" to CCOO's position if the Government does not move forward.
Regarding the 5.3% increase, which would set the SMI at 1,286 euros per month in fourteen payments starting from January 1, Sordo admitted that an increase of 5.3% "is not a smaller increase," since it consolidates a cumulative rise of 70% compared to the SMI of 2018 and shows that this tool "does not cause destruction or contraction of hiring."
"It is a success story compatible with job creation, but we would only accompany that last journey if a full response is given to what we signed a year ago," Sordo insisted, stressing that although the draft Royal Decree of the SMI prepared by Labour does not include that issue, the trade union organizations maintain their demand to review the rules of wage compensation and absorption.
Balance of Yolanda Díaz's management in Labour
When taking stock of Yolanda Díaz's time at the Ministry of Labour, Sordo defined the action of this Department as "quite unprecedented in Spain's recent history," highlighting that Labour has managed to achieve a certain autonomy in its agenda with respect to traditional labour policies subordinated to economic policy.
In his view, the decisions driven from Work in recent years have addressed historical claims by trade union organizations and have made it possible to "invert the causality of the wage devaluation" that marked the previous crisis exits.
"Today, Spain is growing more than the rest of the European countries fundamentally because of the evolution of employment, wages and domestic demand," Sordo has defended, recalling that the country has "more people working than ever" and that the combination of the rise in the SMI and the reduction in temporariness to less than half has been fully compatible with job creation.
In any case, the leader of CCOO has pointed out that these advances "do not prevent analyzing that there are still very chronic problems" in the productive apparatus, such as the strong dependence on seasonality and the persistence of "too many low wages and situations of precariousness".
In this regard, he has explained that precariousness is no longer concentrated as much in temporary contracts, but that it now appears in "working time, its distribution, unwanted part-time work and bad working conditions" linked to health at work. "We have to put value on what has been done, we have to defend and protect what has been done and aspire to take hold of what is still missing, which is also a lot," he concluded.