PP government defies demonstrators and says it is not for turning

Despite a massive turnout across Spain on Sunday at protest marches against the government’s radical labor reforms, as well as widespread cross-party opposition to the measures, the ruling Popular Party on Monday dug its heels in and said it would only contemplate minor changes to the legislation it approved in the form of a decree earlier this month.

“What we saw [on Sunday] was not a majority response,” said María Dolores de Cospedal after emerging from this weekend’s PP congress reinforced as the party’s deputy leader.

“The PP has received a reformist mandate from an immense majority of Spaniards, and the government is determined to carry out an authentic overhaul of the labor model in this country, even though it is not popular,” she added.

De Cospedal was referring to the landslide the PP won in the November 20 general election, which guaranteed it an absolute majority.

The reform makes it cheaper and easier to sack workers, allowing firms to cite so-called objective clauses, such as falling sales, to carry out layoffs unilaterally.

The leader of the main opposition Socialist Party, Alfredo Pérez Rubalcaba, on Monday described the reform as “unjust, unnecessary and ineffective,” and reiterated his group’s intentions to seek its complete amendment in Congress.

Members of the center-right Basque Nationalist party PNV, the centrist UPyD and the United Left also had harsh words to say about it, the latter terming it a “weapon of mass destruction of jobs and rights.”

However, De Cospedal insisted that “the body of the labor reform must be maintained in its spirit and its core.”

With the ink barely dry on the Official Gazette that brought the far-reaching reform of Spain’s labor laws into existence, the head of the CCOO union, Ignacio Fernández Toxo, said Monday that the effects were already “visible” in some services sectors, such as hostelry, where employers have imposed wage cuts.

The makeover of the job market makes it easier and cheaper to fire workers. It also allows companies to unilaterally adjust salaries by citing “objective causes” such as falling sales.

In an interview with Spanish radio station SER, Toxo said that there have also been incidents of changes to the terms of planned layoffs and collective bargaining agreements that were being negotiated prior to the introduction of the reform, which was gazetted on February 11 after being passed by the Cabinet as a royal decree.

People took to the streets en masse across Spain on Sunday to protest the reform, whose ultimate aim, labor unions claim, is to bring down wages, but which the government insists addresses the problem of mass unemployment.

Later, at a presentation of a manifesto drawn up by the Socialist Platform for the defense of the Welfare State and Public Services, Toxo’s counterpart at the UGT union, Cándido Méndez, asked: “If the impact of the labor reform won’t be seen for months, why was it put in place by means of a decree?”

The unions have been accused by the Rajoy government of putting their own interests before those of the unemployed. Méndez said the massive turnout at Sunday’s protests was a clear sign that the unions have tapped the public mood.