The construction companies pressure the Government to pay them the increase in materials

Pressure employers’ association of construction companies to the Government so that it compensates the sector for the rising cost of materials what are causing the bottle necks global supplies that have skyrocketed inflation. The president of the National Construction Confederation (CNC), Pedro Fernández Alén, has assured this Wednesday that the Executive is already finalizing a royal decree to collect this demand, but sources from the Treasury they assure that there is no decision taken about it.

The employer leader has assured that in the last three months the construction materials have been increased by 22.2%, both for large works and for small reforms. This has caused, he has assured, that the 75.61% of the companies of the sector have had to delay jobs in the last trimester. For this reason, he affirmed, the Government is preparing an urgent law that will allow a return to the situation before the deindexation law of the economy of the former Executive of the PP, which eliminated the updating of payments in public tenders based on the data provided by the Statistics National Institute (OTHER).

“We know that the Government is working to make a royal decree that rebalance contracts public. And it is going fast because you can see that they are tenders being deserted, as has happened recently in two cases in Extremadura and one in the Valencian Community. And that now that European funds are yet to arrive. It is a joint work of the ministries of Transport, Economy and Finance“, has affirmed in a meeting with journalists.

According to other sources in the sector, the Transport and Economy departments have already given the go-ahead to the rule, which would now be waiting for the final approval of the one directed to Maria Jesus Montero. But he denies that the work is so advanced. “There is currently no royal decree as such nor is there a decision taken”, assure sources of the same.

Workforce

Fernández Alén has also insisted that lack of skilled labor in the construction sector to develop the projects that are intended to be deployed with European funds: some 700,000 workers additional to the 1.3 million currently available. Therefore, it has asked the Government for a shock plan so that the Construction Labour Foundation, of which the employers and the unions are part and which has a budget of 80 million euros per year (contributed in half by companies and in the other half by administrations), you can train more employees.

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Said foundation, he said, offers specialized qualification to between 80,000 and 90,000 people a year in its 54 centers, but could reach about 200,000 or even more. Additionally, you have requested a Promotion campaign to make construction attractive to women, the young and the unemployed. “It’s a sector that pays well. An ordinary laborer of the lowest scale receives 17,408 euros per year by agreement, 30% more than the minimum interprofessional salary, and the compensation is set at 25.5 days, “he argued.

The president of the CNC has also warned that the sector is concerned about the lack of training and means of public administrations to tender all projects planned with European funds. “let’s go wrong so that the projects are tendered in 2023 and executed in 2026. The royal decree that was made to expedite the contracts has not been as expeditious as was intended. And public employees should be trained so that they can do all this. The problem comes to us from the smaller administrations, “he maintained.