New textiles agreement contains important clauses on employment and participation

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The new collective agreement for the Spanish textiles and clothing industry, signed in April 2000, contains important clauses on improving employment and the participation of workers' representatives. This agreement will have a great impact in the sector and will be a reference for bargaining in other sectors.

The Intertextile Council (Consejo Intertextil) employers' organisation and the sectoral trade union federations - the Federation of Textiles-Leather, Chemical and Allied Industries (Federación de Industrias Textil-Piel, Químicas y Afines, FITEQA) affiliated to the Trade Union Confederation of Workers' Commissions (Comisiones Obreras, CC.OO), and the Federation of Allied Industries (Federación de Industrias Afines de UGT, FIA-UGT) affiliated to the General Workers' Confederation (Unión General de Trabajadores, UGT) - signed a new general collective agreement for the textiles and clothing industry on 13 April 2000. The agreement covers 2000-2 and affects around 250,000 workers (9% of all wage earners in industry). The agreement represents a radical change for industrial relations in the textiles industry and will be a reference for bargaining in other sectors due to the innovative nature of the provisions on improving employment and the participation of workers' representatives.

Background

The Spanish textiles industry has undergone permanent restructuring since the 1970s, when the economic crisis and international competition had a profound effect on this highly protected sector oriented towards domestic consumption. It has now been partly reoriented toward export, with major innovations in technology, but small, nationally owned companies are still predominant. The restructuring has led to job losses and great pressure to reduce labour costs, particularly in the most labour-intensive areas such as clothing manufacture, which employs 55% of the sector's workers.

Partly due to these circumstances, the collective agreement for the textiles industry has traditionally been one of the "worst" sectoral agreements in Spain, with low wages, long working hours, and a lack of social dialogue concerning the application of the agreement or covering a wider range of topics. Furthermore, unlike other sectors, the textiles industry has no company agreements, and measures to improve working conditions are not common and are usually informal.

After several years of difficult negotiations, in April 1998 this stagnation was broken with the signing of an agreement that marked a profound renewal of the occupational classification system. A process of reflection between the employers' organisations and the trade unions also began, in order to modernise the framework of industrial relations and to consolidate a culture of dialogue, bargaining and joint responsibility. The process has not proved to be simple, but is beginning to show results: after a transitional agreement in 1999, in 2000 an agreement with important new features has now been signed with the full approval of both parties.

The main new features

On wages and working hours the agreement follows the trend of the past few years, and offers no major surprises. The wage increase is moderate (although with a clause on wage revision to cover the difference between real and expected inflation) and an agreed annual working time reduction of 16 hours will affect only those on night and weekend shifts. On the initiative of the trade unions, bargaining concentrated on defining criteria and measures for making an effective contribution to employment stability and the application of the agreement in the sector.

One out of three workers in the textile industry has a temporary contract. Temporary employment is at a far higher level than in other industrial sectors and is concentrated in certain areas (clothing manufacture) and certain companies (in general, smaller ones that do subcontracted work). Subcontracting is very widespread in a sector in which most companies are small family businesses: 36% of the companies have no employees, 22% one employee and 36% between two and nine employees. Home work – often illegal – is still common, particularly in clothing manufacture and among women.

To deal with the problem of precarious employment, various measures have been laid down in the collective agreement. Some lay down the justifiable reasons for, and limitations on, the use of temporary recruitment:

• the different types of temporary recruitment are defined more precisely in order to prevent them being used inappropriately. In the case of the "work and service contract", for whose use it is more difficult to specify the justifiable reasons, it is established that the company should inform the workers' representatives of the tasks to be performed before the contract is entered into;

• consecutive temporary contracts, with the same or different workers, involving activities of the same nature, in the same company or in companies of the same business group, even when the contract type is not the same, are considered to be in contravention of the law (and the contracts are therefore automatically considered as permanent); and

• a compensation payment of of 12 days' pay per year worked is introduced for temporary contracts, except for training contracts.

A number of very innovative measures in the agreement also regulate use of "external" contracts:

• in relation to home work, the principal company that uses this type of work relationship (directly or through subcontracts) is obliged to control and check the application of the legal requirements on contracts;

• the activities to be carried out by temporary agency workers must be non-permanent and wages must be the same as those in the user companies, except for supplements that are not linked to production; and

• in the subcontracting of activities, the principal company is responsible for the application of the sectoral collective agreement in subcontracted companies which have the same activity as the contractor. Companies whose activity consists in organising and managing the transformation of textile products through third parties are also included in the area of application of the agreement.

Significantly, the effectiveness of these measures will be enhanced by the agreement between the trade unions and employers' associations to apply them through consensus, with greater participation of workers' representatives:

• the agreement gives management and workers' representatives six months in which to analyse the contracts situation in each company, and one year for the company to adapt contracts to the terms of the agreement;

• every year, each company will analyse with workers' representatives the relationship between production activities and the types of contract used, as well as the forecasts for production and contract use for the following year. The company must also provide a copy of all employment contracts and contracts with temporary work agencies, and information on any subcontracts that are entered into; and

• at sectoral level, a joint employment commission has been created to provide guidance and mediation on the application of agreements on contract issues. Similar commissions may be created at local level if the social partners see fit.

The most innovative feature of the agreement, however, is the new definition of "workers' representatives": besides workers' delegates (delegados de personal), workers' committees (comités de empresa) and trade union delegates (delegados sindicales), the term now includes the trade union federations that signed the agreement. Persons properly accredited by the federations may act as workers' representatives in textiles companies in order to monitor the agreed provisions on employment and to guarantee the effective application of the agreement at all levels.

Commentary

The textiles industry agreement will without doubt have a great impact, and not only in the textiles sector. It shows a high degree of consensus between the employers' organisations and the trade unions on the central importance of employment. As has been seen, the agreement establishes measures to promote stable recruitment, some of them particularly innovative - such as the strict definition of what constitutes a contravention of the law, in order to avoid the use of consecutive temporary contracts. Another particularly innovative feature is that the treatment of employment also includes external contracts: home work, temporary agency work and above all subcontracting.

The agreement does not merely establish regulations: it deals with the application of the agreement in all its complexity. The new commissions and participation mechanisms that have been established show a clear intention to define policy on contracts and subcontracting by consensus, increasing the participation of the workers' representatives.

The most important feature of the agreement is the redefinition of workers' representatives in order to deal with the "atomisation" of the sector and the difficulties of worker representation in smaller companies or ones with more unstable employment. Up until now in Spain, the presence of representatives from outside the company had been agreed only in the construction sector and exclusively for health and safety. Through this clause, the textiles employers have given the trade unions, which could not previously act as workers' representatives, a great capacity for intervention that will help to ensure the effective application of the agreement. It is to be hoped that the proper exercise of this new right will reinforce dialogue and bargaining in the textiles industry and serve as a reference for other sectors (María Caprile, CIREM Foundation).