Report examines collective bargaining in first half of 2000

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In late July 2000, the CC.OO trade union confederation issued a preliminary report on collective bargaining in 2000. The major trends recorded are that agreements tend to have a longer duration and that there has been an increase in the number of company agreements and in the number of clauses on employment, wage revision and shorter working hours.

On 27 July 2000, the Trade Union Confederation of Workers' Commissions (Comisiones Obreras, CC.OO) issued a preliminary report on collective bargaining in 2000, based on provisional data for the first six months of the year.

The report considers the context of collective bargaining to be similar to that of 1999 (ES9912100F). It is characterised by high economic growth (a 4.1% rise in GDP and a 29.1% rise in net profits of companies outside the financial sector) and relatively high inflation (3.6% in June, whereas the government forecast was 2%). CC.OO accuses the employers of taking advantage of this situation of economic boom to ensure quick profits through high price rises. Employment is increasing and the number of people entering the labour market is decreasing, which means that the rate of unemployment reached a historic low-point of 15.01% during the first quarter of 2000. However, temporary employment continues to affect a high percentage of the wage-earning population (31.7%). The rotation of temporary contracts is also increasing and new "services companies" are being set up in attempt to avoid the regulation of temporary work agencies, thus leading to a considerable deterioration in working conditions.

Up to June 2000, a total of 2,480 collective agreements affecting 6,831,708 workers were recorded, a higher figure than that of the previous year. However, as has been happening for some time, revised agreements are more common than newly negotiated ones. Only 20% of the agreements pending negotiation had been signed. The reasons given by the report are structural. On the one hand, it is common practice to wait for the prevailing agreement to expire before starting negotiations. On the other hand, company structure is dispersed and resistant to collective bargaining, the collective bargaining structure is very atomised and little articulated, and the trade unions lack resources for dealing with these problems. Finally, the contents of the agreements are increasingly complex due to new uses for collective bargaining, particularly for dealing with flexible management of the workforce.

The report points out that, although the structure of collective bargaining is still based on provincial agreements, there has been an increase in the number of company agreements and pacts, in which a particular feature is the lack of union involvement - the trade unions were not involved in 27% of company agreements, and a further 18% were not signed by CC.OO or the General Workers' Confederation (Unión General de Trabajadores, UGT). CC.OO claims that collective bargaining is poorly articulated and proposes that company pacts should be linked to the corresponding sectoral agreements by giving a supervising function to the joint committees which oversee these sectoral agreements. Other changes mentioned in the report are a slight increase in national and regional sectoral agreements and the appearance of agreements that regulate new economic activities.

The study finds that the duration of agreements is tending to become longer. Regarding the contents of bargaining, the main findings are as follows:

• following the tendency of the past two years, 81.24% of the agreements registered until June contained clauses referring to employment and recruitment. However, in many cases these clauses merely repeat the content of the law (for example, the maximum duration of temporary contracts) or are too general to have specific regulatory effects. The report points out a new tendency - the increase in the number of clauses offering compensation to workers for failure to renew temporary contracts (these clauses affect 31% of workers, 10% more than in 1999). CC.OO considers that trade union representatives should avoid accepting compensation in exchange for giving up the legal requirements covering temporary employment (grounds for use and limits on duration);

• the average wage increase laid down in the collective agreements was 2.77%, almost one percentage point below the increase in the retail prices index. The number of clauses on wage revision has again increased, and they are now included in 70% of the agreements. CC.OO stresses that a longer duration of agreements and the great difference between real and forecast inflation make wage revision clauses essential. Nevertheless, it seems that 1.7 million workers covered by collective agreements will suffer a loss of purchasing power in 2000;

• the average number of working hours set by agreements was 1765.1 per year, which is 3.3 hours less than in 1999. Some 29.77% of the agreements provide for shorter working hours. Similar problems are noted to those of previous years - the reduction in working hours is not linked to job creation but sometimes linked to the flexible distribution of working hours, while overtime is not dealt with and the gap between agreed and real working hours continues.

There seems to have been a progressive increase in conflict associated with collective bargaining, though at the moment little detailed information is available.

Finally, the report points out the lack of reliability of the available data on collective bargaining in Spain due to the lack of rigour in gathering data and poor processing.