Protect rights, achieve future: on May 1 that claims extra time and extra life | Economy | EUROtoday

May 1, 2025 is known as to be a clamor claiming the authorized discount of working time. The settlement reached by CC OO and UGT with the Government of Spain to scale back the utmost authorized day to 37.5 hours per week will start its legislative journey, and the favored demand from the road appear important to switch to Parliament what’s the nearly unanimous will of the citizenship to which they are saying they characterize the completely different political teams within the Chamber.

In addition, seen in perspective, the social agreements achieved in these years (SMI enhance, labor reform and discount of temporality, public intervention earlier than the pandemic disaster via ERTES), had consolidated an thought as we speak hardly attachable. The union necessities which have been doable to materialize in legislative adjustments, nonetheless being inadequate, have been extra socially, but additionally extra economically efficient.

Today the Spanish financial system grows greater than the European surroundings, we attain unknown figures of occupation and the wage hole has been considerably decreased. For the primary time in Spain, on the similar time, employment, productiveness per hour labored, the typical retribution of wage earners, and improves the outside industrial stability.

Obviously, there isn’t any room for self -complacency within the face of an unemployment price better than the European common, with thousands and thousands of working individuals with low wages, with 796 fatalities of labor accidents or with housing costs that extract an excellent a part of the wage on the vast layers of the working class.

But indisputably the studying of the labor insurance policies of current years, clearly completely different from these executed in different historic durations, assist new union claims such because the aforementioned discount of the working day, or the inexcusable reform of the unjust dismissal, which should accommodate our laws to the European Social Charter successfully defending the employment contract.

However, what occurred on this planet after Trump’s second arrival in energy within the US has expanded the main target. The industrial battle unleashed by the brand new American administration is, within the opinion of UGT and CC OO, far more than a conflict of tariffs. It is true that within the first occasion it’s an assault on related sectors in our financial system akin to agricultural merchandise, automotive parts, the pharmaceutical business and others. But it’s no much less true that an escalation within the tariff wrestle will find yourself extending to the entire financial system, as a result of our present deeply interconnected productive methods and being mutually dependent. The danger of slowdown and even international recession will not be discharge. And these situations at all times hurt them: to the working and fashionable lessons.

For this motive, the unions have requested from the Government of Spain, in addition to to completely different regional governments within the conferences convened for this function in some autonomous communities, that safety measures are activated for the sectors and jobs that may very well be affected by the offensive out of Trump.

We are conscious that there are a lot of extra issues at stake right here. The offensive of the brand new Republican administration will not be completely financial. It is a part of a dispute over international hegemony on this planet. Today Trump’s USs not solely threaten a democratic regression inside their very own nation, but additionally to undoubtedly dynamite any multilateral area of the worldwide order arising after World War II and the successive subsequent occasions. Fiscal methods and as a consequence the social safety of Europeans, our normative assortment, our personal democracy, are being harassed little that the phrases are interpreted (we’ll see the acts) of the brand new “digital nurses” of this reactionary globality.

The European Union has to articulate a standard and never fragmented response to this offensive. To do that, we should deepen the political and financial integration of the Union, which can’t be tied by governance norms and even unanimity to undertake selections, which make it ineffective. Today, the Trojan horse inside Europe constitutes governments of the acute proper and ultras forces that situation political life in our international locations, which need to make the union soar via the air, and undergo the overseas pursuits that assist them and finance them.

EU strategic autonomy must be strengthened, decreasing dependence in important issues within the economies of the twenty first century. Starting with vitality autonomy. Today the deployment of renewable vitality is a key issue for a rustic like Spain to draw productive and industrial funding and generate new and higher jobs. To do that, industrial insurance policies have to be developed, each in Spain and within the EU, that they situation the funding selections of the businesses, at a time of recomposition of the worldwide worth chains of worth and degrabization.

Together with bettering our autonomous capabilities in vitality, industrial, or safety issues, we should strengthen cooperative relations with all of the world’s massive financial areas, diversifying them. Today safety is greater than protection coverage, and protection is greater than a meaningless arms profession in a political area akin to Europe, whose armed forces have coordination and interoperability issues.

We want to advertise an incredible European funding fund that underpin the strategic financial system of the Union. There will probably be no bold political building of the EU that doesn’t assist a powerful social pillar. Therefore, any financial fund should have a a number of imaginative and prescient of their priorities. In the social and discount of inequalities; in industrial and vitality transition reinforcement decreasing overseas dependence on this area; in analysis and digital innovation; within the safety of unemployment and different contingencies; And additionally in widespread overseas coverage, safety and protection that autonomies the geostrategic positions of the Union, make all doable efforts to maneuver conflict away, and concentrate on the multipolarity of the world during which we’re already and, above all, of the world we go to.

Europe, regardless of all of the deficits and insufficiencies that also drags in its building, should reaffirm its dedication to social democracy and the renewal of a social contract that protects the dwelling circumstances of social majorities. The European social mannequin is as we speak the nice goal to beat for the brand new hawks of the extremism of rights that threaten the world. From world unionism – and, in fact, the European and the Spanish – we wish this May to attach with essentially the most felt and historic claims of the labor motion. Today greater than ever, on May 1 it’s nonetheless important to defend conquered rights and open its solution to new social conquests.