Battle lines being drawn over job reform

Labor unions, the Socialists and other opposition parties began gearing up on Sunday for a showdown with the Popular Party (PP) government over its controversial labor reform, which was passed as a decree on Friday.

The first protests over the government’s new job package ended with arrests when police busted up a demonstration outside of Congress late Friday night, detaining nine people who were taken before a judge on Sunday for holding an illegal street protest.

Labor officials, including Cándido Méndez and Ignacio Fernández Toxo, of the CCOO and UGT unions, announced they would hold a series of demonstrations beginning next Sunday that could lead to a general strike.

“This is an annihilation of workers’ rights that will only lead to more unemployment and fewer jobs,” said Óscar López, the Socialist Party secretary, after meeting with his colleagues in Segovia on Sunday.

Socialist leader Alfredo Pérez Rubalcaba is expected to meet with Méndez and Toxo on Monday to analyze the labor reform, which he said he opposes because it makes it easier for employers to fire workers.

The PP, meanwhile, snapped back at the outpouring of criticism over the Cabinet decree. “The unions are protesting only because they have lost their ability to influence,” said María Dolores de Cospedal, the PP secretary general and regional premier of Castilla-La Mancha.

“There is no one in Spain with decent common sense who doesn’t know that labor reform is needed. [The unions] are protesting because now it will be the employers and workers who will be able to decide how to save their future.”

Spain’s unemployment rate has reached 22.8 percent — one of the highest in the European Union — and some forecasts, such as one released on Friday by bank BBVA, predict the country’s jobless rate will surpass 24.6 percent by next year.

Among the striking features in the government’s new job reform package are rules that make it easier for companies to lay off workers, with a payout of 20 days for each year worked if employers can demonstrate actual or forecast losses, or show that they have had three consecutive quarters (nine months) of falling sales.

What is being termed as “express firings” — because unions and employers will no longer have to come together to negotiate the conditions of the layoffs — will also affect the public sector.

According to the law published in the BOE official gazette on Saturday, “offices and administrations that form part of the public sector” can resort to the new layoff scheme if they can demonstrate nine months of “sudden and persistent budgetary insufficiencies.” This would affect all public sector workers on the national, regional and local levels.

The labor reform prohibits public administrations and ministries from looking for other ways to cuts expenditure, such as dropping work hours or suspending contracts on a temporary basis.

Some labor experts see this “express firing” clause as another tool that the Rajoy government can employ to help bring down the deficit.

In the private sector, workers on permanent contracts will also see their end of employment compensation pay reduced from 45 days’ pay for every year in service — up to a maximum of 42 months in cases of unfair dismissal — to 33 days per year, up to a maximum of two years’ salary.

Temporary contracts can no longer be extended for more than two years under the new reform.

Employers’ groups, including financial experts at the European Union-level, have for a long time been asking Spain to change the rules governing how workers are hired and fired in the country as a means of fomenting job creation.

“The reform isn’t aimed at trying to solve unemployment but instead using the crisis as an excuse to revert the job rules to past times,” said Méndez, the UGT secretary general.

Still, the CCOO and UGT don’t want to jump the gun and call a general strike at the moment. “We are going to hold a series of protests before, because we are not going to fall for the first trap that the government has set out for us,” says Toxo.

“We need to keep on talking [with the government] because the signing [of the decree] doesn’t mean that the negotiations have come to an end.”

During the protest on Friday outside Congress, nine people were arrested early Saturday morning after scuffles broke out between police and demonstrators.

A police spokesman said the detained — all men between the ages of 22 and 41 — would be charged with illegal protesting, disturbing the peace, assaulting police officers and resisting arrest.

At press time, a judge was determining their case.