PP and Vox refuse to comply with the agreements with unions and employers that Alfonso Fernández Mañueco signed in 2021, as reported by the UGT, CCOO and CEOE after the first meeting of the Social Dialogue with the new government of Castilla y León, which has been delayed for almost three hours. Already at the end of the meeting, the regional president has decided that tomorrow, Tuesday, the ministries will convene the Social Dialogue monitoring commissions, where they will be told if the already signed agreement is executed or if it is rejected and they demand a new negotiation.
Unions and employers are considering going to court to enforce the agreements. The Vox Employment Counselor, Mariano Veganzones, has proposed a renegotiation of the agreements that were already signed and budgeted for 2022. Unions and employers have shown their disappointment after the appointment, their intention to continue working with the Board.
Employment is the portfolio that negotiates the largest budget in the Social Dialogue: the Annual Employment Plan (Paecyl) is budgeted at almost 300 million euros in active employment policies, but the Employment Strategy, Vocational Training, Prevention of Occupational Risks and Equality, Co-responsibility and Youth and the Economic Dynamization Agreement of the Mining Municipalities, according to the unions. “Possibly there are no problems with the other ministries, but nobody has guaranteed us that there are no problems,” added the general secretary of UGT Castilla y León, Faustino Temprano.
The president of the CEOE Castilla y León, Santiago Aparicio, has reproached that they have found “an insurmountable wall in the face of solid and consistent arguments on the part of the workforce and business” on a day “that must be erased from the calendar”.
The leader of the UGT has explained that these agreements, “already negotiated, signed and budgeted”, not only affect the Vox ministries, but also those of the PP such as Family, Education, Finance, Presidency and the previous Ministry of Public Works -which it is now split in two.
“For Vox, the PP-Vox government agreements are more important than those of the Social Dialogue,” the UGT leader has reproached, who has also accused the Employment Minister of not having convened the monitoring commissions of “skipping” the commission to through decrees. The regional secretary of the CCOO, Vicente Andrés, explained that the regional government has questioned all the agreements “from a technical and legal point of view to say that they will not comply with them”.
“This was not built overnight and it will not be destroyed overnight,” contradicted Vicente Andrés, who has opined that the majority of the Board (PP) does believe in Social Dialogue and another ( Vox), no, and has considered that the ‘popular’ part complies with the agreements and not that of Vox. “Is there a government that resists it? It seems that the PP was not too worried ”, he asked himself.
Mañueco had not officially met with the social agents for more than six months, who considered the Social Dialogue restored after Mañueco’s break with Ciudadanos, who had experienced moments of great tension with unions and employers.
The meeting was attended by, among others, the president of the Junta de Castilla y León, Alfonso Fernández Mañueco, the regional vice-president, Juan García-Gallardo, the Minister of Employment, Mariano Veganzones, the secretary general of UGT Castilla y León, Faustino Temprano, the regional secretary general of Workers’ Commissions, Vicente Andrés, and the president of CEOE, Santiago Aparicio.
The Board ensures that 9 of the 18 agreements are not in force
The Vox Employment Counselor has repeatedly cited Law 40/2015 on the Legal Regime of the Public Sector —a state regulation— to justify that not all Social Dialogue agreements were in force, such as Serla, the agreement for the quality of employment in the hiring of the Junta de Castilla y León or agreements on housing, among others.
Article 49, to which Veganzones has referred, establishes that the agreements cannot exceed four years “unless a longer period is established by law” and that they can be extended for another four years. And the eighth additional provision requires the adaptation of all agreements signed by any Public Administration to be adapted within a period of three years.
The spokesman for the Junta de Castilla y León, Carlos Fernández Carriedo, has discharged responsibility in some “technical reports” that will decide which of the hundred agreements that the government has signed since 2001 are still in force and which are not. The unions and employers talk about 18 agreements, not a hundred.
Nothing of the cut of the 20 million euros
The cut of twenty million euros announced by Vox was not addressed at the meeting, an amount on which the Employment Minister insists, although he has assured: “It is not a cut, it is to allocate a budget to more effective policies.” When the cut was announced by the Ministry, in the middle of the electoral campaign in Andalusia, Vox tweeted: “Vox confirms the cut in subsidies of more than twenty million to unions and employers.”
✂💰 VOX confirms the cut of subsidies in more than 20 million to unions and employers in Castilla y León.
🚜 We organize a conference on Tourism in Cantabria to promote local trade.
👥 We present in Congress our plan against depopulation. pic.twitter.com/3ZTMsqa7F3
— VOX 🇪🇸 (@vox_es) June 27, 2022
In addition, the president of the employers’ association, who has been very harsh with the regional government, has softened the amount of the cut. “There are 13 million euros of which 80% are finalists for different programs. The 20 million is not reality, it is a figure that I do not know where they got it from because what comes to us is 13 million euros for different programs”, Santiago Aparicio has settled, who has lamented the “enormous uncertainty” that he has “at the door” to companies that want to invest in Castilla y León.
More than a month of tension
The meeting was scheduled for June 29, but had to be postponed because the regional president tested positive for COVID. Trade unions and employers have shown during this month their concern for the future of Social Dialogue. A few weeks ago, the CCOO secretary described this conversation as “one of the most difficult of all years”.
At the beginning of June, Vox announced a cut in half of the subsidies received by social agents for social dialogue, occupational risk prevention, professional guidance and self-employment, which the counselor Veganzones estimated at 20 million euros and the that none of the social agents had been previously informed.
The spokesman for the Junta de Castilla y León, Carlos Fernández Carriedo (PP), left the cut in the hands of Vox and did not finish specifying if the cut was a negotiable decision. Ten days later, Vox backed down: the cut was going to be, at most, of those twenty million, but they did not even know how much the cut would be.
The discrepancies between PP and Vox in the cuts to unions and employers were evident in the Cortes when the Popular Party gave a ‘yes’ to the Proposal No Law (PNL) presented by the PSOE, which included recognition of the trajectory of the Dialogue Social, its current legal framework and the “correctness” in its institutional practice, “avoiding attacks derived from extreme ideological positions that threaten the stability of the Social Dialogue”.
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