“We insist that women must be incorporated and we are looking to see if we are capable of welcoming immigrants,” Pedro Fernández Alén, president of the National Construction Confederation (CNC), said on Tuesday. Employers in the sector have warned that there is a shortage of labor in general and that in particular there are not enough workers to deliver the government’s plan to build 184,000 new affordable rental homes .
“At the time, we estimated the labor shortage at 700,000 workers,” he recalls. But that was “before the president of the government proposed the 184,000 social housing units”. According to him, “if we want to achieve this objective, it depends on the manpower and the execution time”.
“Right away” is a complicated challenge, according to the president of the CNC. “If we say that four workers make a house using a rough calculation, we would say that we need 700,000 more,” Fernández Alén said.
The president of the construction employers’ union in Spain made the comparison with 2007, just before the bursting of the real estate bubble, “2.7 million families lived in the construction sector. Now we have a million. Then, “650,000 housing units were built” each year. And “there were fewer public markets”.
Currently, “we are building barely 85,000 housing units,” he explained. “The optimal pace of construction would be 150,000 housing units.” [cada ejercicio]. But taking into account the deficit of recent years, these 150,000 housing units should have been built and 85,000 have been built, while 300,000 housing units are being created…”
In the midst of the debate on immigration, the CNC positioned itself totally in favor of the “regularization of immigrants here”, because “that way we would fight against the underground economy and we would have a lot more labor and a lot more of social contributions”.
Furthermore, the president of the construction employers’ association assured that it was necessary to “seek to bring in immigrants from outside”. As he explained, one way to achieve this is the one that “companies use privately, which are two agreements with Peru and Chile, in which you do not have to prove that you have a lack or an urgent need for labor, that this » It is a very complex procedure for both companies and workers.
“We are trying to sign more agreements or generalize agreements of this type, because with this type we can have work,” added Fernández Alén.
“In the meetings we had in Moncloa, it was said that they wanted to launch 184,000 housing units, and they asked us: ‘when can these housing units be delivered?’ It must be taken into account that the maturation period is 36 months, while public tender records continue to be broken. [por el impacto de los fondos europeos del Plan de Recuperación]“, he declared during a press conference held at the CEOE headquarters.
“The problem is that these are not watertight compartments, the 184,000 public housing units promised by the government are being planned, but many other urban developments are being launched and many private works are being carried out. A very active housing policy cannot be launched immediately due to lack of manpower,” lamented the president of the CNC.
“What we know is that major infrastructures are not going to lack workers. This will never happen. That is to say everything that is launched by Adif, the Ministry of Transport… Companies concentrate their efforts there,” he continued.
