The general secretary of the union, Raúl Arza, has stressed that the “Basque framework defends itself by negotiating agreements” and that they defend any agreement that improves conditions, “even if it is state-owned.”
The general secretary of UGT Euskadi, Raul Arza, has defended the new labor reform agreed with the Spanish Government and the CEOE and has addressed the ELA and LAB unions assuring that “they will have to explain How does this reform harm Basque workers?“since if the norm is not approved, “we would be left with the 2012 reform”.
Arza has mentioned three “important” aspects of the reform, such as the recovery of the ultra-activity of the agreements, the reduction of temporality thanks to the disappearance of work and service contracts, and the regulation of subcontracting. Although he has admitted that it will be necessary to “open a second phase to touch on some issues that are in the PSOE-United We Can government agreement, and has cited the “substantial improvement in working conditions, which until now has been done unilaterally, and reviewing the causes and compensation for dismissal, among others.”
In an interview granted to Radio Euskadi’s “Boulevard” program, the trade union leader stated that the “Basque framework defends itself by negotiating agreements” since the situation in Euskadi “is not good” in that sense. As revealed, some 360,000 workers have their agreement “pending or decayed”. Thus, from UGT Euskadi they defend that agreement that improves conditions, “even if it is state-owned.” Along these lines, he clarified that there are no more than 20 regional agreements in the Basque Country and that the majority are provincial agreements, for which he has branded the debate on the prevalence of regional agreements against state agreements as “more political than economic” .
In addition, he has denounced the Temporality in the Basque public sphere, since “unfortunately the Basque Government is the first of the class in that”. According to his data, 42% of public workers in the Basque Country are temporary and he has called on the Autonomous Executive to “take advantage of the laws approved in Madrid to lower this interim to below 10%”. “Of the 80 prevention technicians in Osalan, 71 are temporary or of the 190 counselors in Lanbide, more than 170 have a temporary contract.”
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