WORLD WORLDWIDE SPAIN News Journal Update - (en) Spaine, CGT: RETURN TO WORK X-RAY, IF YOU HAVE WHERE TO COME BACK. - José Manuel Muñoz Póliz* (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 Millions of people were returning to work at the end of August. However,

many of them no longer had anywhere to return. That August is a bad
month for job creation is not something new, but it is somewhat
contradictory with some of the promises that were made with a labor
reform that came to end job seasonality through permanent employment. An
issue that has remained pending, as have other characteristics of job
insecurity that have been maintained with a reform that is as
unambitious in its articles as it is grandiose in its propaganda.

The year 2023 in Spain has shown weaker job creation than in previous
years and unemployment remains at high levels, being the EU country with
the highest registered unemployment rate with 11.7%, followed by Greece
with 10.8% and far from the EU average, at 5.9%. This unemployment rate
is 3 points higher in the case of women, which shows that, despite the
reduction in recent years, there is a chronicification of the gender gap
in access to and sustainability of work, in addition to the gap salary 1 .

Unemployment has increased territorially, compared to the previous
month, in Melilla (3.62%), Balearic Islands (3.27%), Euskadi (2.34%) and
Catalonia (2.27%) especially dragged down by the sector services as in
the State as a whole. The only Community that has improved its data is
La Rioja with a slight 0.37 less unemployment, with 49 fewer people
registered as unemployed.

By sectors of activity, as usual, Services has been the most affected
with 23,097 more unemployed, while the collection campaigns have boosted
employment in Agriculture with 2,874 fewer unemployed people.

Regarding youth unemployment, despite the reduction in recent years, it
has increased by 0.23% with special weight among women (+0.55%) and
maintains Spain as the EU country with the highest unemployment highest
youth with 27.2%, followed by Greece with 23.2% and Romania with 22.3%.

The permanent contracts for the month of August were 171,886 full-time
(-21.06%), 94,546 part-time (-20.51%) and 152,495 discontinuous
permanent contracts (-10.32%).

Regarding the quality of work, there are sufficient qualitative and
quantitative indicators to maintain justified concern. Even the
neoliberal think-tank Fedea, in its latest analysis, warns that "we are
beginning to see signs that the fall in contractual temporality is not
being accompanied, at all, by a reduction in real job insecurity. That
is to say, there is a segment of workers who, despite the fact that
their contract is now labeled permanent, is still very precarious when
we look at the number of days worked, their salary, the type of working
day and the high periods of inactivity. that they present" 2

Although the first causes of dismissal from Social Security continue to
be due to the end of a temporary contract or the transition to
inactivity of a discontinuous permanent permanent contract, we can
notice an intense rotation of contracts with layoffs in record numbers
476,220 until June, which represents 39.9% more than in the same period
of 2022 and the maximum since 2013 when the historical series begins.
For their part, both disciplinary dismissals (55% of the total
dismissals) and dismissals for not passing the trial period (free
dismissal) increased by 16.9% in one year, with a total of 468,914.
These formulas benefit from the broad flexibility of layoffs, favored by
the legitimization that the labor reform has made of it. Thus, the
majority of dismissals occur for disciplinary and objective reasons,
forcing the worker to litigate to obtain meager compensation and without
opting for the processing salaries for irregular dismissal that the
Popular Party withdrew in 2012 and with which the "progressive"
government that maintains this attack on labor rights seems to agree. A
high daily creation and destruction of employment is being observed, a
symptom of high turnover and intermittency or discontinuity in
employment or the shorter duration of indefinite contracts.

According to a report commissioned by MITES, "job insecurity affects
11.9 million people, of which 8.1 million are salaried employees
(34.7%), 1.2 million are self-employed (5%) and 2. 6 million unemployed
who have previously worked (11.2%). Of the total number of precarious
workers, two thirds are part of the salaried population, almost a fifth
are unemployed workers and the remaining 10% are self-employed workers
without dependent workers" 3 . Precariousness has been established in
work for decades of a commitment to lower wages, flexibility, temporary
work and part-time work and the innovative reforms only reconfigure it
with these same premises.

Fixed-discontinuous contracts were called to be the substitutes for
temporary ones, as was recognized by the Ministry of Labor and Social
Economy itself, the regime's unions, the CEOE and the human resources
companies, which launched multiple manuals and training for the
conversion of these. With this premise, the fixed-discontinuous contract
already represents 36.4% of all permanent contracts in August. A
relatively low figure, due to the possibility of storms before the
summer campaigns, if we compare it with the 50% they represented in
April. Regarding the overestimation of indefinite employment that the
use of this type of contract can produce, it seems to be indicated by
the data provided by the government that an overestimation of employed
people could occur although in reality they are without activity. A
growing phenomenon after the labor reform. This is clear from the
government's answer to a parliamentary question, since we still do not
have the monthly data that the government promised to offer. And in
Spain, the transition to inactivity of a discontinued permanent employee
is the second cause of sick leave for workers, only behind the end of a
temporary contract.

T he loss of purchasing power in Spain continues to be the highest in
the OECD since the pandemic with more than 7% of the average salary that
working families have less today. This situation has shown a slight
decline if we take into account the moderation of general inflation and
a slight increase in agreed wages, but not if we take underlying
inflation as a reference. The rise in prices is in a third phase, after
the first related to the increase in energy prices, a subsequent phase
led by the consequences of the war and currently a phase of transfer of
final prices much higher than costs where the profit margins of
companies (especially large ones) are subjecting the entire population
to a strangulation of their salary made available by the greed of a few
people. Business margins are at record levels, 13.3% according to the
Business Margins Observatory. According to the Bank of Spain report,
profits have grown seven times faster than salaries. Crises accentuate
the effect Profits have grown seven times faster than salaries. Crises
accentuate the effect Profits have grown seven times faster than
salaries. Crises accentuate the effectRobbing Poor 4 , taking resources
from those who have less to increase the profits of those who are
already rich.

Source: BdE, AEAT

Thus, it is not strange to find that 70% of people are dissatisfied with
their salary and we have accumulated decades of loss of purchasing power
in Spain that in the current situation make it very difficult to
maintain a decent life project. All this while we observe record profits
in large companies that are taking advantage of adverse situations for
the entire population to increase profits. The percentage of workers in
poverty in Spain marks the third highest figure in the entire EU with
11.7%, only behind Romania (14.5%) and Luxembourg (12.9%) and at 3.2
points of the average of 27. As a consequence of these phenomena,
savings, which during the pandemic rose to 21%, have currently fallen to
9%, Therefore, if this trend continues, a good part of domestic
consumption will be reduced, thus causing a slowdown in the economy that
could have a strong impact on the future of employment. A derivative
effect is that families are withdrawing their money from bank deposits
at the highest rate since 2012, the working class draws on savings to
face the loss of purchasing power by withdrawing 12,286 million from the
banks. We must also take into account that the tools used by financial
powers such as Central Banks, far from relieving the pressure of working
people, put inflation on their backs with exorbitant interest increases,
creating more expensive financing for those who need it the most. need
and more restricted. This month the European Central Bank has raised
interest rates by 25 points again,

For its part, although public employment is colloquially associated with
better working conditions, and in many cases this is true, the data
shows us that in reality this is not always the case. Public employment
has a large pool of people in precarious situations, with temporary
employment rates much higher than private employment as a whole and
levels of loss of purchasing power similar to any other employment.

Temporary employment in public employment doubles that of private
employment and has remained the same in 2023 since the rebound it has
shown since 2013. Currently the public sector is 16.7 points above the
private sector in temporality with 31.3% of temporary contracts . This
also has a strong feminized component, since it affects women in a much
greater proportion, where temporary contracts represent 36% compared to
men who do so at 24%.

The volume of public employees' wages compared to the increase in the
cost of living has deteriorated since the 1980s. So much so that until
2015 they accumulated purchasing power losses of almost 40%. This
phenomenon is multifactorial, but it should not hide a reality and that
is that salary containment in public personnel has been a premeditated
strategy by different governments and of different political colors for
more than four decades.

If we look at recent years, public salaries have had a similar behavior
in terms of the impoverishment of the purchasing power of salaries. The
poor negotiating capacity of public workers due to the negligence of the
majority representatives, added to a negative view of public employment
by the media and right-wing parties, means that they tend to consider
mobilization beyond specific and particular cases assuming a stigma that
neoliberalism imposes. However, as we have seen in these brief lines,
there are sufficient reasons for us, as a collective, There is a fight
to recover a good part of the rights lost in these years and an
opportunity that cannot be missed is this cycle of agreement
negotiations that opens in the coming months. There is an opportunity
ahead, in a few months of collective effort, to be able to recover years
of attacks on the dignity of millions of workers.

In this brief analysis, we have seen some of the issues to be resolved
at work in this country. In contrast to triumphalist speeches, reality
shows important deficiencies and shortcomings for the working class. Not
in vain, problems related to employment are, as a whole, the first cause
of concern for the population. According to the CIS, the crisis occupies
first position with 33.7%, closely followed by unemployment (33.5%). In
third place, political problems continue (22.3%) and the fourth is the
quality of employment, which goes from 11.8% in May to 16% and climbs
two positions. 90% of Spaniards do not feel committed to their work and
Spaniards are the least happy Europeans in the workplace. In the end,
all these working conditions have consequences on the health of the
workers. The increase in workplace accidents after the return to
post-pandemic activity has been added to a relevant fact to take into
account from now on: the experts appointed by the MITES calculate that
33.2% of the cases of depression that the active population suffered in
2020 resulted in job insecurity. Also in the section on mental health at
work, we have known that, at least one 15% of workers in Spain
acknowledge having suffered at least one situation of workplace
harassment throughout their lives. In the case of women, this figure
almost doubles that of men. This figure must be considered a minimum,
since there are still deficiencies in identifying and acting on
harassment. Likewise, many employees hide the resulting problems
(anxiety, depression...) due to the possibility of being retaliated by
companies through mobbing or dismissal.

The conformism of political, union and, of course, business
representatives is chronicling the daily reality of millions of working
families, condemning them to an increasingly lower salary, worse working
conditions and an absolute disposition to the will of their bosses. It
is necessary to address a shock plan for the quality of work that makes
it possible to reverse the very high levels of precariousness, improve
the capacity of family finances, have more free time and of better
quality, promote health at work and in itinere , improve the prevention
of mental health problems and balance the balance of wealth that is now
in very few hands, while millions see how it is increasingly difficult
to make ends meet.

Once again it is the working class, as happened in 2008, who is made to
bear all the suffering from the economic and political powers to solve
the problems that capitalism generates for us. It is not acceptable that
the recipe is always the same reason why an immediate recovery of rights
is necessary that involves, at least, a series of minimum measures that
protect working families.

It is essential to recover employment protections with the increase in
compensation for dismissal and the return of processing salaries in the
event of all types of dismissals that are declared irregular.

Address the reduction of working hours to promote access to more people
while expanding the availability of their own time.

Start a real prosecution of irregular and unpaid overtime that allows
workers to recover their salary and time while favoring the reduction of
unwanted bias.

Recover the purchasing power of salaries, recognizing the debt generated
in 2022 and introducing it in the year-on-year increases in addition to
current inflation in the negotiations of collective agreements.

Extend the coverage of collective agreements to large sections of the
working population that remain outside of them.

Promote the stabilization of public employment.

Establish measures and legal reforms to identify, prevent and punish
workplace harassment.

Reduce the power of private mutual insurance companies in occupational
health.


1https://in-formacioncgt.info/la-brecha-07-realidad-salarial-mujeres/

2https://documentos.fedea.net/pubs/fpp/2023/09/FPP2023-05.pdf?utm_source=wordpress&utm_medium=portada&utm_campaign=estudio&_ga=2.30494204.2103410266.1693831465-1881247834.169383146
5

3https://www.lamoncloa.gob.es/serviciosdeprensa/notasprensa/trabajo14/Documents/2023/170323-informe-salud-mental.pdf

4https://elpais.com/elpais/2013/07/16/3500_millones/1373952120_137395.html

* General Secretary of CGT from 2013 to 2022
_________________________________________
A - I N F O S  N E W S  S E R V I C E
By, For, and About Anarchists
Send news reports to A-infos-en mailing list
A-infos-en@ainfos.ca