The UGT unions and the Workers’ Commissions announced this Monday that they will demand that the General Administration of the State equalize the salaries of workers and civil servants. “They cannot continue to maintain wage inequality, nor the grievances that arise against other public administrations,” said the federal secretary of the UGT branch, Carlos Álvarez, during a conference joint press.
The negotiation procedures for the new agreement, the fifth, will begin on November 4 with the denunciation of the previous agreement, with which the unions consider having achieved “the fundamental fundamental objective, which was a new modern professional classification, which adapts both in the current education system and with the status of public official.
“After having approved the professional classification in the previous agreement, we must now take this second step, which is the equalization of remuneration,” insisted the spokesperson for the UGT-Public Services sector in the single agreement IV, Elena Tarjuelo, who stressed that this equation is a question of “justice”. “There is the same qualification requirement, the same basic salary,” he said before emphasizing that, in certain cases, such as in the case of forestry agents or aeronautical mechanics of the Army of the Air, the Ministry of Defense is one of the departments with a greater number of employees: this difference exceeds 3,000 euros per year.
The pay gap that the unions want to remedy is not only between civil servants and blue-collar workers. “We have accumulated years behind other public administrations. The data is stubborn and, in comparison with other autonomous communities, such as Madrid, the salary differences are estimated on average between 8 and 11%”, indicated the spokesperson of the CCOO in the previous agreement, Vidal Cruzado. who denounced that “the workforce is economically inferior and mistreated compared to all other administrations”. Moreover, he indicated that these differences do not only concern the basic salary “Even in a mathematically objective concept. like Antiquity, we see a very notable difference in the value of the triennium.”
In the new negotiations, the UGT and CCOO hope to improve the salary conditions, but also promotion, of the nearly 40,000 civil servants. In this sense, the organizations regretted that the horizontal career, which allows workers to progress in their jobs, “in force in many autonomous communities”, has not yet been implemented in the General Administration of State, nor for civil servants.
The general secretary of the CCOO sector, Esther Abajo, demanded from the Ministry of Public Service that the negotiation be “dynamic” and take place “within a reasonable time” so that “it allows the conditions of the personnel who serve”
Concretely, the unions estimate the number of vacant positions in the sector at around 10,000, which result from dismissal policies produced “following the financial crisis”, the reduction in public employment offers and the “outsourcing of service”. Álvarez, who pointed out that most of these positions have already been announced in 2021 and 2022 and in the next job offer in 2023 and 2024. “We understand that employment is going to be recovered, but that means that they will be able to cover the positions, we must therefore make the offer attractive,” he stressed, to recall that, in this case, the administration is in competition to attract talent both with other administrations and with the private sector.
