The president of the Spanish Confederation of Business Organizations (CEOE), Antonio Garamendi, stated this Thursday that they will study the CCOO and UGT salary proposal. However, he has been “surprised” at the section in which they ask the Government to raise taxes on companies to 15% if they do not reach an agreement.
Garamendi made these statements before his participation in the Forinvest Conference in Alicante, when asked about the salary proposal of the CCOO and UGT in the negotiation with the employer with the aim of requesting salary increases of 5% in 2022, 4.5% in 2023 and 3.75% in 2024.
Garamendi has affirmed that he will analyze the proposal of the unions, at the same time that he has been “surprised” by a section of the document. “I don’t understand it, they say that if we don’t reach an agreement, they are asking the government to raise taxes on companies to 15%,” he criticized. Likewise, he has assured that they are going to work on the unions’ proposal, but he has reiterated his surprise at this point because he considers that it is “the intervention of the State in something that precisely should not be there.”
“What you have to do is make the companies flow. The companies are having a huge cost problem, an energy bill, in many cases also raw materials”, he lamented, while pointing out that the governor of the The Bank of Spain and the economists have warned of second-round inflation, for which they have advocated “managing it in a reasonable manner.”
With respect to the union proposal, he has also expressed that he does not understand “that the Government should be the one that has to mark in each sector what the index is or not”. “We would be talking about minimum, maximum or average salary. It would be the global SMI and that would not enter into what we could talk about,” she stressed.
