The Spanish Confederation of Business Organizations (CEOE) refuses to apply retroactive salary increases for 2022 and advocates negotiating with the unions a new framework agreement for employment and collective bargaining (AENC) that reaches 2025. The employers have analyzed this Monday, in an internal meeting, the proposal made by the unions last week to resume the AENC negotiation and in which they propose a rise of 5% for 2022, 4.5% for 2023 and 3.75% for 2024, reviewable in function of a clause that takes into account inflation and the economic situation of companies.
As sources from the organization explained to EFE, employers do not welcome an increase for an already closed financial year and are more inclined to extend a possible new AENC until 2025. In addition, they have defended that salary reviews be linked to factors such as productivity and insist that an AENC goes beyond wages and must address many aspects. Although a counterproposal from the employer has not been closed with new figures, the sources consulted advance that those raised by the unions are higher than what has been agreed in agreements, 2.8% until January; and that it is advocated more to speak of maximums than of closed numbers of increase.
The design of the clause proposed by the unions and that combines inflation with the economic situation of the companies based on a newly created index with information from the Tax Agency is also not agreed in the employers’ association. They also reject the request of the unions to the Government so that, if an agreement is not reached, it takes fiscal measures with changes in the corporate tax.
After the new proposal of the unions
The intention of the employer is to transfer their proposals to the unions in a next meeting, foreseeably on March 13. The UGT and CCOO unions made a new proposal last week to try to unblock the AENC negotiation with the employer. The union proposal goes through the aforementioned salary increases and they set the first of May as the deadline for this AENC negotiation.
In this regard, they ask that if there is no agreement, the Government sets a minimum contribution in the Corporate Tax of 15% or 20% of the total benefits. The negotiation on a new AENC was blocked in May of last year mainly due to the inclusion of salary review clauses linked to inflation, an element demanded by the unions and rejected by the employer.
