The Ministry of Public Function and the unions CSIF, UGT and CCOO have begun negotiations this Wednesday for a new agreement, which will include a salary increase for more than 3.5 million public employees. After weeks of a strike by the Executive, the union organizations have left this first meeting with good feelings, although still without a figure for updating salaries for 2025, one of their main demands.
The negotiation will address salary improvements, but also other organizational measures regarding employment and improving working conditions. The Public Service wants to draw a new multi-year framework, from 2026 to 2028, that allows us to move towards “a more participatory Administration, that offers personalized care services, that designs public policies that improve the lives of citizens and that is prepared to face innovation and adaptation to the double transition, digital and green,” indicated the Secretary of State, Consuelo Sánchez Naranjo.
The Ministry will meet weekly with the union organizations, with the aim of having “as soon as possible” an agreed text to take to the General Negotiation Table of Public Administrations. The department headed by Óscar López has opted to begin conversations with matters related to employment and it will not be until next November 19 when they will submit an economic proposal regarding salaries, as reported by the CSIF union.
In terms of salaries, a red line for the unions is that the update of salaries pending 2025 be negotiated, outside the multi-year agreement. “We are not willing to go through a year of freezing and zero increase,” the general secretary of UGT Public Services, Isabel Araque, indicated at the end of the meeting. The secretary of union action of CSIF, Francisco Lama, has spoken along the same lines, verbalizing the desire conveyed by the Administration that there be an “economic agreement” for the years 2026 to 2028 with “an increase from the current 2025.”
The salary increases for this multi-year period will have, as the Ministry has conveyed to the unions, a fixed component and a variable component, “so that public employees do not lose purchasing power.”
“The first meeting has not been bad at all and we have put on the table what our demands are. We are clear that there are three blocks – salary, employment and rights -. From there, this has to be an agreement not only for the 3.5 million public employees, but for the public services and citizens of this country,” Araque insisted.
In this sense, CSIF has proposed “a short-term human resources plan, which allows us to resize our public services to offer adequate services to citizens” and alleviate the “slowdown of selection processes.”
Source: www.eldiario.es
