The crisis linked to does not leave any trace in the direct subsidies that, through the General Budgets, the Spanish unions receive each year. Quite the contrary, the period between 2020 and 2022 will be to remember in the plants, given that these allocations, in addition to putting an end to the freeze that they had shown since 2013, see their amount doubled in just two years.
Specifically, they go from the nine million disbursed in 2020 to the 17 million euros contained in the State Accounts that have been in force since last month. There is nothing comparable to such rapid progress, and of such magnitude, in the evolution of union subsidies registered in the last two decades.
These disbursements (whose main beneficiaries, although not the only ones, are the UGT and CCOO) have already accumulated a very long history; Not in vain did they start at the beginning of the 1980s. However, the 20 years that have passed since 2002 are especially significant for analyzing the attitude that different governments took towards them, and gauging to what extent their most recent increase is anomalous.
In that period there were not only two socialist presidents and two popular ones. In addition, there was an economic crisis comparable in its effects to the one that later
It was President Rodríguez Zapatero who brought union subsidies to what, until now, had been their maximum: 15.7 million per year. But the turbulence that has been unleashed since 2008 forced him to freeze them. His successor, Mariano Rajoy, followed the same policy during his two terms, after reducing them to 11.1 million in 2012 and 8.9 million in the following year.
Lack of precedent
Consequently, there is no precedent for such a large increase in direct disbursements for unions (proportional to their level of representation) as has occurred in the last two years, and even less so in an economic emergency situation such as the one that marks both exercises.
The marked desire of the Government to gratify the centrals in such a generous way can only attract attention. However, the truth is that this rapprochement coincides with a period in which the majority unions, UGT and CCOO, have a growing importance, and increasingly exclusive, when it comes to moving forward with the legislative initiatives of the Executive, while the employers CEOE and Cepyme are relegated.
This situation could be verified once again this week, when the Ministry of Labor approved the new increase of up to 1,000 euros per month, with the only company of the union leaders Pepe Álvarez and Unai Sordo.
That was the second time, in a short space of time, that a closing ranks of Vice President Yolanda Díaz with the UGT and CCOO was staged regarding the SMI. A few months earlier, in September 2021, its increase to 965 euros per month was also carried out without the business organizations giving their consent.
It is true that the Government could have decreed both increases unilaterally, without counting on any of the social agents. However, it is also true that the Government intentionally seeks the express endorsement of the unions, especially in areas in which the confrontation with the employer’s positions is already clear. This also happened with the approval of the 0.6% increase in social contributions, for ten years from 2023, to replenish the Reserve Fund of the pension system.
The National Employment Agreement, signed at the beginning of the 1980s, defined the need to subsidize unions annually to contribute to their “socio-cultural activities, the promotion of workers and the organization of training activities”, typical of these kinds of organizations. Since then, they have been distributed each year in proportion to their representation, according to the results obtained in the union elections.
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