SANTA CRUZ DE TENERIFE, 30 Apr. (EUROPE PRESS) –
The national secretary general of the Canarian-PNC Coalition, Fernando Clavijo, has argued that the labor reform approved last February “should not be an end point in the fight for workers’ rights.” “Much remains to be done and it is the responsibility of all political forces, but also of social and economic agents, who cannot remain on the sidelines,” he emphasized.
The leader of the Canarian nationalists took advantage of the meeting held today, Saturday, one day before the commemoration of International Workers’ Day, with social and economic agents of the Archipelago and within the framework of ‘Canarias nee’s you’ to demand “a greater effort of the Governments of the State and the Canary Islands in active employment policies”, while demanding to adapt employment policies to the new economic scenario marked by the rise in prices and the war in Ukraine.
At the same time, he maintained that this more immediate strategy “must be accompanied by a long-term roadmap, agreed upon with the unions and the economic fabric, which allows generating opportunities in the Islands, improving the duration of contracts and making a commitment for a real economic diversification that generates quality and better paid jobs”.
In the same way, Clavijo recognized “the impact that the rise in prices of electricity, fuel and the shopping basket is having on Canarian households, on the most vulnerable families, on young people from the Canary Islands”; a situation, he pointed out, that “is not being addressed by the Government of Spain or by the Executive of the Canary Islands”.
In this regard, he argued that the approval of the royal decree this week in Congress to deal with inflation and the impact of the war “not only turns its back on the Canary Islands, but also leaves them in a more vulnerable situation than to any citizen of another territory”. For this reason, he stated that the Canarian nationalists will fight so that the ‘anti-crisis’ bill that will be processed urgently in the Cortes includes specific measures to protect the most vulnerable.
“We cannot stay in the short term or say that the economic crisis derived from the covid has been overcome when without leaving it we have entered another one due to inflation and the war conflict,” added the secretary general, who emphasized the data from the Active Population Survey published this same one and that once again place the Canary Islands as one of the autonomous communities most affected by unemployment, with 15,500 more unemployed in the first quarter of this 2022 and 16,700 jobs destroyed, to which it is necessary to add that the Islands have the lowest wages and are at the head of youth unemployment in Spain and Europe. “These are data that should make us rethink the strategy that the Government of the Canary Islands has set in terms of employment,” he said.
PROPOSALS OF THE NATIONALISTS.
During the meeting some of the proposals of the nationalists were debated, among which those aimed at promoting and maintaining that labor relations continue to be part of the social agreement, so that neither unilateral nor bilateral decisions will be taken without the tripartite agreement between organizations trade unions, business and the government.
In this context, they emphasized the need to reinforce the specific treatment of the Canary Islands as an outermost region through, on the one hand, the increase in the financial statement allocated to the Archipelago by the EU in order to reach the average GDP per capita of Spain and, on the other, the exemption of up to 50% of the Social Security contribution of the entire active population employed in the Islands, relating it to the length of their contracts.
The nationalists also addressed the need to introduce changes in collective bargaining in companies with more than 50 people on the workforce in which they propose that it be optional for the bargaining table to have a company collective agreement, while, if it is not reached said number, the sector agreement would prevail unless, by agreement between the parties, another consideration was provided.
They propose all this taking into account that 51.45% of the companies have between one and two jobs, increasing the percentage to 74.16% for those with 5 jobs, while 89.15% have 9 jobs and 97.56% have less than 50 in the archipelago, data that should serve to measure economic and employment policies.
Another issue addressed was that of working conditions. In this regard, the Canarian nationalists demand the implementation of measures not only from the perspective of remuneration and temporality, which must be accompanied by other factors, such as the necessary economic diversification, the connection between training and economic agents in order to guarantee an opportunity to access the labor market for young people and the commitment to new markets and more specialized and better paid employment niches. In addition, they are committed to countercyclical measures in terms of health and safety. Specifically, they propose a new Law for the Prevention of Occupational Risks and, in parallel, the creation of an arbitrated body by the public administration aimed at minimizing labor conflict, they concluded.
