The UGT and CCOO unions have reached an agreement and already have a joint proposal that they will present to employers in the near future to set an indicative path for salary increases for the coming years, in which salaries are reviewed not only according to inflation but also also depending on how business and sector profits evolve.
As EL MUNDO has learned, this will be his last attempt to reach a consensus with the CEOE and Cepyme to sign a new Agreement for Employment and Collective Bargaining (AENC), the umbrella that should guide the negotiations of agreements in the coming years and that is pending renewal from 2021. If the employers are not willing to negotiate this proposal or present an alternative as a result of the document, the unions will definitively declare the agreement dead.
The blockage in collective bargaining is mainly due to inflation, which has been the unexpected guest at the table and is what has made it difficult in recent years for representatives of companies and workers to reach an agreement on how much they should raise wages in the country. For the former, the loss of purchasing power made them demand a high revaluation of salaries and the inclusion of salary review clauses -advised against by organizations such as the Bank of Spain, since they are considered inflationary-; while, for the others, accepting these provisions meant condemning companies to very high increases in labor costs in a scenario of uncertainty.
The inclusion of these clauses - essential for the unions and unaffordable for the employers - put an end to the negotiations, which were interrupted before the summer and were resumed in January, with a first contact that this medium reported. The CCOO put on the table last month the possibility that these review clauses not only take into account prices, but also benefits -something that companies had always claimed- and now it has reached a joint position with UGT to make a serious approach to employers.
His offer will consist of fixing salary increases for the coming years and including some review clauses that take into account approximately 50% of the evolution of prices and another 50% of the benefits of the company and its sector. UGT and CCOO are finalizing whether the percentage distribution will be exactly in half or not.
Their intention is to present it publicly this week and send it to the employers, although they are not very confident about how it will be received, since CEOE and Cepyme do not seem very interested in reaching an agreement and could feel more comfortable self-regulating each agreement. -without general guides in the country-, as up to now.
Taking into account the evolution of business profits -what companies earn clean after expenses- could put an end to the complaints from employers, when they argue that a company that is in losses or that sees its margin cut cannot assume an increase of the costs such as the one that raising the wages of its staff would entail. Even so, the social dialogue should refine how exactly the evolution of the benefits of a company and a sector is calculated -based on what data-, so that there is certainty that all parties are satisfied with the mechanism.
Throughout the past year, the unions have fought agreement after agreement to obtain salary increases and the inclusion of salary review clauses, unleashing particular conflicts in those sectors and provinces in which they could not advance in the negotiation.
According to the Statistics of Agreements of the Ministry of Labor, the agreements registered until December 2022 accumulated a salary increase of 2.78%, while the 1,774 agreements registered in January have an increase of 2.81% and, of these, 298 include salary clauses that cover 1.46 million workers (27.2% of the total)
The incidence of clauses has been increasing as inflation has risen. The Bank of Spain quantified in August that 25% of workers with an agreement already signed for 2022 were affected by said clauses, compared to the 16.6% observed on average between 2014 and 2021; and warned that by 2023 "an additional increase in this incidence was expected: up to just over 45% of workers with an agreement already signed for said exercise."
The lack of a general guideline, included in an AENC, has made collective bargaining difficult in 2022, in fact only 3,303 agreements were registered, while in the years prior to the pandemic the number of registered agreements was much higher, around 5,500. .
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