The Madrid agreement is seeking to centralise collective bargaining and the demobilisation of workers

Jun 10, 2015
On the 14th of May, the employer associations CEOE and CEPYME and the Trade Unions CCOO and UGT signed the 3rd Employment and Collective Bargaining Agreement for the years 2015-2017. It is an agreement that is restricted to carrying out a series of recommendations, which are not obligatory in collecting bargaining agreements. For ELA, this agreement is seeking two points: the demobilization of workers and encouraging the nationalisation of collective bargaining.

In Bilbao this morning, the secretary general Adolfo Muñoz “Txiki” and Mikel Noval, head of the consultancy and social policies area, made an assessment of the agreement signed in Madrid by the employer associations CEOE and CEPYME and the Trade Unions UGT and CCOO.

For ELA, the agreement restricts wage increases to 1% for this year and to 1.5% in 2016. Likewise, the agreement endorses all the business strategies designed to attack working conditions and reduce salaries: temporality; part-time work; increasing the company’s decision-making power over its workers; sub-contracting (including outsourcing), the refusal by the employer associations to include labour subrogation clauses in order for the labour rights to be reset to zero in each allocation; the nationalisation of collective bargaining, both for sectors and for business; the mass fraud that occurs in personnel hiring that is not pursued by the public authorities.

Within this context, Muñoz stated: “The contents do not warrant the Trade Union signatures. This agreement, which only includes recommendations, may only be understood if it is accompanied by public funding of the trade unions and employer associations that have signed it”.

Muñoz explained that the chairman of the employer association, Joan Rossel has requested public funding for trade unions and employer associations, in addition to greater centralisation of collective bargaining. “The elimination of trade unions like ELA has long been an ambition for the state organisations”, he emphasised.