Employers and unions break off negotiations for a wage pact

The patronal and the unions the negotiations for a new salary agreement this year. This has been made public by the parties this Thursday, after maintaining the last contacts and verifying that they see no room for an agreement that guides collective bargaining and throws into a cycle of labor conflict in the negotiation of collective agreements. The CEOE Y CCOO Y UGT they have not been able to agree on how to share the costs of inflation and the war and they leave the table this year, leaving it up to each federation and each sector to agree on (or impose) salary increases for the coming years. With the risk that this will lead to a cycle of strikes that are already brewing in various sectors of the Spanish economy, as is the case of call centers (the first is scheduled for May 13).

The Agreement for Employment and Collective Bargaining (AENC) is a kind of ‘agreement of agreements’ that the leaders of CEOE, Cepyme, CCOO and UGT renew every three years. Its objective is to give its federations and sectors a guide so that when they sit down to negotiate agreements they have a reference on what salary increases to propose. It is non-binding, but it helps jump-start difficult negotiations. The last one has expired since 2020, the pandemic made it difficult to renew it and now inflation is going to lengthen the blockade a little longer.

The AENC negotiation has not been fluid at any time and during the last two months the social agents have tried to find a formula that would allow the workers not to lose purchasing power and that companies maintain sufficient margins so as not to lose competitiveness. It has not been possible and, given the impasse into which the parties have been cornering, the negotiations have broken down.

The revision clauses, the main stumbling block

The centrals advocated generalizing the salary review clauses, which would make it possible to agree on more parsimonious salary increases now and then compensate them at the end of the year depending on how much inflation has risen. The employers did not want to talk about it and imposed a frontal veto on this formula, given the foreseeable increase in labor costs that this would have entailed. The pressure from various federations towards the leadership led by Antonio Garamendi so that not accepting this path – which I did not like either – has marked the end of the negotiations. Here the companies play with time in their favour, because the longer they hold out without agreeing, the lower -presumably- inflation and they will be able to propose lower increases.

Already last year the salaries agreed by agreement lost purchasing power, rising 1.5% on average and closing the average CPI at 3.2%. And this year they are going the same way, although with a substantially larger difference. Until March, the salary by agreement was 2.4%, while inflation evolved to 8.4%, a differential of more than six points that will have to be seen how the year ends. Faced with this disparity, the scenario for strikes is served. There are already conflicts in the barcelona metalin the buses of Lleida or there were and they were deactivated ‘in extremis’ in the cleaning of Barcelona and Hospitalet de Llobregat, among others.

Related news

The centrals have not been able to get the bosses out of their castling. The unions have already focused their First of May more in demanding better salaries than in celebrating the labor reform. And on Wednesday the second vice president, Yolanda Diaz, gave them a cape urging the CEOE to sit down to negotiate and accept better salary conditions. Neither one nor the other have taken effect and the employer will decide the salary recommendations that it sends to its associates. As an example, the salary of CEOE’s structural staff saw an increase in their payroll this year the 2.1%.

What will happen after 2022?

Neither employers nor unions rule out that from next year they can close some kind of salary agreement. But that negotiation will already be from next year. Which implies that the agreements that are now under negotiation have three scenarios ahead of them. On the one hand, they can keep the agreement frozen (and with it the salaries) and the workers lose purchasing power. The second option is to agree on a one-year agreement and wait for the leadership to agree next year and give them a reference to agree on the following years. And the third is to agree to an agreement according to their own conditions, where the unions will press for better salaries and the companies on the contrary.