The Ministry of Public Service has proposed to civil servant unions a cumulative salary increase of 10% until 2028. This increase, transferred to the negotiation table of the new agreement, would include the pending update of 2025. Workers’ Commissions have called the proposal “offensive” and have warned that it is either “more ambitious or the general strike in December will be a reality.”
As indicated by the general secretary of UGT Public Services, Isabel Araque, at the end of the meeting, this first proposal “complicates the negotiation.” “A multi-annual agreement of this type has to guarantee purchasing power,” he recalled. Something that the Ministry already committed to in a meeting held a couple of weeks ago. For the years 2025 and 2026, the Government would have proposed that the amount cannot exceed 4% accumulated, according to union sources.
With inflation above 3% in October, pressured by electricity, transportation and basic foods such as eggs, this salary increase does point towards a loss of purchasing power, at least in that biannual period, in which the forecasts for increases in the CPI are between 2.7 and 2.9% for this year and 1.7% for the next.
“The Government boasts of leading the economic growth of the European Union, while proposing to continue with the policy of salary containment for Public Administration personnel, with a worrying rise in inflation, while forgetting that public employees in this country continue to be below the European Union average,” CCOO denounced in a statement.
Unions and the Ministry will meet again tomorrow, Thursday. The first, after having carefully analyzed the proposal; The others, after “studying the approaches made by the union organizations,” have transferred from the department headed by Óscar López. “We imagine that the Government is going to make numbers,” Araque indicated.
On October 30, the ministry agreed on a calendar of meetings to advance the negotiation of the new agreement, after weeks of tension with the union organizations UGT, CCOO and CSIF, which even threatened a strike by officials if talks did not begin. Since then, this Wednesday is the third meeting and the first in which the Government puts a first economic proposal on the table, after having advanced its intention that the salary increase would not entail a loss of purchasing power for the nearly 3.5 million public employees and that it would be multi-year, until 2028.
At last week’s meeting, the Secretary of State for Public Service, Consuelo Sánchez, had raised the possibility of streamlining the oppositions and promoting the internal promotion of civil servants. In both cases, these are historical union demands, which have been denouncing the cadence between the calling of the processes and the effective incorporation of these personnel into their jobs and the difficulties in moving up the administration’s organizational chart.
Source: www.eldiario.es
