Madrid – Continuing as planned, finally this Monday, June 3, 2024, a final working meeting of the negotiation table ended up taking place for the drafting of the first national Collective Agreement of major brands in the textile and footwear trade. I find that it was closed again without agreements and without progress, and in the form of a more striking than effective game of smoke and mirrors, whose flashes are beginning to become a dangerous resource against which the members are going to begin to be required to respond. from the negotiating table.
Promoted, as we have been repeatedly recalling from FashionUnited, it will be exactly a year ago by the new employers’ association of the large fashion multinationals with presence and activity in Spain, the Spanish Retail Textile Association (Arte), since then and To this day we will not deny that it has been easy to try to approach the drafting of this future new and first national Collective Agreement for the big brands in the textile and footwear trade. Starting with the fact that the drafting of the same came from a proposal from a new business organization with absolutely no track record, but supported by the representativeness conferred on it at the time by the multinationals that promoted its creation, a group at that time made up of the Inditex Group. , with its brands Bershka, Massimo Dutti, Oysho, Pull&Bear, Stradivarius, Kiddy’s Class, Zara and Zara Home; H&M; Primark; the Iberian Sports Retail Group, subsidiary for Spain of the British multinational leader in the fashion and sports equipment sector JD Sports, and parent company of the subsidiary companies JD Spain, JD Canarias, Sport Zone and Sprinter; Uniqlo; and Mango. A group of founding companies to which since then names such as Kiabi, Pepco, Awwg, Bimba y Lola, Tendam, Parfois, Hugo Boss, Mayoral and Encuentro Modas have ceased to join.
While in this way, and at an internal level, Arte itself worked to try to reinforce its representativeness when promoting this new Agreement by adding new members, and also strengthening its structures with the appointment in October 2023 of Ana López -Casero Beltran as the new president, the same business association worked to advance the drafting of the Agreement with the help of the main representative union organizations of the sector, at the national level. An issue that has not ceased to slow down the negotiation of this agreement, adding to the stoppages in the negotiations that these tasks of “self-affirmation” of Art as a new representative business organization of the sector brought with them, which in the same way ended up being generated as a consequence of the union war that continues to keep the Fetic already UGT. Organization is that, after Fetico was admitted to be part of the table from an extrajudicial agreement approved after she challenged her exclusion from the negotiation before the National Court, she decided to leave the same negotiation table at the beginning of year, also threatening to challenge any type of agreement that ends up being agreed upon by a body that they continue to describe as lacking fair representation.
A sum of incidents that have ended up delaying, in a more or less understandable way, the progress of the negotiations, but negotiations on which now there is still no progress; on this occasion also beginning to outline a dangerous game of cat and mouse from which the union part and the representative of the companies attached to Arte would be tempting from one side and the other. And the ways in which these negotiations are being approached, which, as such, started from a first proposal by Art which was considered practically an insult by the unions sitting at the negotiating table. To such an extent that the management of the business association itself did not take long to try to justify itself by arguing that it was only an initial text intended to serve as a basis for negotiations. But nothing like proposing a proposal that is going backwards so that every millimeter can be presented as a great advance… while the unions for their part also seem to try to contribute to these delays, who knows if by preparing to later use them to finish forcing their demands.
Competing positions (and controversial commonalities)
After that first proposal, we will call it “indicative”, CCOO, in its capacity as the main union organization with representation at the table, was in charge of presenting a First proposal at the beginning of January of this 2024. Proposal that was responded to by a first Art counterproposalalready in April, and which is what once again served as the basis for the meeting held this Monday, June 3.
According to CCOO in this regard, during the meeting the Arte employers’ association was in charge of continuing to defend and detail some of the key points of their April proposal. A series of aspects that were discovered to be far removed from the demands demanded by CCOO on behalf of all the workers in the sector, and that the same union organization advances that they will try to correct by drafting a new, more detailed counterproposal, and that It is expected that it will begin to be debated during the next meeting of the negotiating table. A meeting of which, for the moment, the date for which it will be scheduled has not transcended, but the one that will begin from there, it seems that it will finally try to specify specific points of the new agreement, following for this with the negotiation by blocks that was agreed to continue for its drafting in January.
As an example of the positions in which the parties find themselves for some of the points defended by Arte from its proposal, CCOO points out that they could not disagree more with its temporary disability (IT) proposal from which they defend the suspension of salary supplements during the first 10 days, to start paying 75 percent of the base salary, from days 11 to 20, and 85 percent, from day 21, for IT. And, the union points out, “companies know that paying or not paying the supplement does not affect the number of sick leave, so people who are sick should not be penalized.”
Accompanying this more than controversial issue, they also disagree with the measures proposed by Arte to reconcile personal and work life, among which include the creation of a 10-hour permit for medical accompaniment of first-party relatives. degree; the regulation of parental notice of 8 weeks, with a notice of 1 month and the possibility of postponing the enjoyment of the days; or the adaptation of the working day and its regulation, but “especially for managers.” Points to which CCOO have responded by pointing out that “many companies, either by agreement or by equality plan, have these measures included or even improved”, as well as that “we are not going to accept a proposal that could represent an obstacle in the equality of opportunities between men and women, such as the proposal to regulate the adaptation of working hours, especially for managers.” Ending their opposing points in a proposal to promote the mandatory nature of life insurance, which the union describes as “harmless” since all multinationals in the sector have life insurance, although they welcome the fact that it is protected by agreement.
Along with this sum of opposing positions, the parties do agree on another series of points presented by Arte since its proposal, such as the constitution of a commission to analyze and develop an employment pension plan; in the creation of a joint Health and Safety commission from which, among others, to influence “psychosocial risks”, an issue that “is related to the increase in casualties”; and also the creation of a training observatory for employment and the creation of training itineraries. An issue that is also controversial, in this case due to the proposal of Art and supported by CCOO, from where “we consider training to be an important point, creating these itineraries and relating them to professional certifications, which are intangible values for working people”, not because cannot actually be beneficial for the workers, but because of all the cases of fraud and corruption related to the holding of training courses that have been tarnishing the image of the main national unions in recent years. And we cannot fail to overlook the fact that throughout negotiations that have lasted for almost a year, with absolutely no agreed point between the parties, one of the first to do so is the one who will precisely serve to continue “feeding” the controversial system of training courses taught by union organizations.
As a summary, “at the meeting of the negotiating table for the agreement of large textile brands”, this Monday, June 3, 2024, “the employers’ association has continued to present some of its proposals”, indicate from CCOO through a note. From here, “in the next meeting, we will begin to talk in blocks, starting with ‘Classification and contracting'”, among the total of four in which it was agreed to structure the negotiations. Some conversations that will take place, they conclude, while the union “prepares a more detailed counterproposal, in which the reality of the sector is seen,” and that, they defend, “guarantee working conditions that may be above and improve those that “They are not.”
