In the middle of the debate on the dismissal of the colonel of the Civil Guard Diego Pérez de los Cobos after the Supreme Court ruling that considers the Minister of the Interior, Fernando Grande Marlaska, "illegal", a new front can be opened with the "political blockade" that suffers from the Law for the Coordination of Fire Prevention, Extinction and Rescue Services (SPEIS) and that establishes a legal framework for the fire brigades of the Spanish territory
Because the bill has been slowing down for 30 months after its approval with a large majority of 203 votes in favor and a 14-month amendment process that closed in December 2021. "We have exhausted the institutional path and the Our willingness to dialogue and ability to reach agreements have finished," Israel Naveso, president of the Unitary Firefighters Coordination, which includes 21,000 professionals from airport, regional and local bodies, detailed on Wednesday.
And at the end of that line of dialogue without a solution, what the firefighters are proposing is the mobilization in the streets "before the summer" as a method of protest for the "unfavorable treatment" that they understand they are suffering with respect to other state bodies. The example they give is that the 1985 Local Regime Bases Regulatory Law gave a one-year deadline to approve the Firefighter and Police Statute. The latter was done, 38 years later the firefighters do not have it.
But the main conflict is now in the law stopped by the Ministry of the Interior and that the members of the Coordination attribute to the fact that the Government is using the process as a "bargaining currency" with the Catalan and Basque nationalists for the approval of the Budgets State Generals. Because those parties oppose the text that has been promoted above all by Podemos by trying to maintain a model like the Catalan one, based on the figure of the volunteer firefighter. "The consequence is that they take away our powers and prevent us from carrying out our work with guarantees. They oppose what their own workers are demanding of them for their own legal security," Naveso told the press.
And all the controversy occurs with the first forest fires making an appearance, as in Castellón or Asturias in recent days, but also with a "less mediatic" increase in fires in factories or homes. "It is costing us lives and hundreds of millions of euros", they have had an impact from the Coordinator that was formed nine years ago, in January 2014, still with a PP government, to carry out its regulatory framework that continues to slow down. "It has coincided with a time of elections every two years that has been causing the proposals to decline." And when it seemed that he could get ahead, the blockade.
Because the professionals have come to meet for six hours with the political representatives of the Parliament of Catalonia, since Esquerra Republicana is one of the parties that shows the greatest opposition. "Everything was reduced to nationalist sentiment, to which Madrid centralizes, without justifying anything else," Naveso has detailed, who has also focused especially on volunteer or low-cost firefighters, a widespread model in Catalonia and, above all, Castilla y León, where normally it is only necessary that they sign up in a job bank in the Town Halls.
"A very tough summer is coming up for all the fire services, we have come as far as we have come, but we have the option of mobilizing quickly, before the summer," warned the members of the body present at an informative breakfast in Madrid where they also The case of the airport firefighters has been dealt with, who since the entry of private capital into Aena denounce that "345 million people depend on a listing" of the company
"Firefighters have been succumbing to stock rights and our endowments have been cut," detailed Ruyman Capote, a member of the Coordinator, who has ensured that the workforce has been reduced to "the minimums established by law." In Madrid Barajas or El Prat, considered category 10 aerodromes, there are seven professional staff per shift and in others such as Tenerife Sur, category 9, there are six.
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