The second vice president and Minister of Labor, , inaugurated this Wednesday the International Labor Congress: towards a labor internationalwhich will be held in Madrid over the next two days. Díaz has placed it at the center of the international debate on labor matters, and has considered it one of the most relevant demands “of this time.” In addition, he has been proud of the reforms that his department has carried out in recent years, including labor reforms. “We have taken bold measures that had not been taken in our country,” he said.
This Wednesday’s event – which will be followed by four debate tables on Thursday that will have international labor rights at the center of the conversation – began with a minute of silence that swept the province of Valencia and other municipalities in the country.
After this tribute, Díaz took the floor and listed what, in his opinion, are the main challenges facing work at this time. “Economic democracy is another of the great challenges of this time,” he noted. “Democracy is decent work, that people can live from their work, have a home and bread to give to their children. That they can count on the State when a catastrophe like Dana takes everything away from you. Democracy is the power of the citizens, not of a group of powerful people no matter how much money they have. It is the economy that has to be at the service of society,” he assured.
However, above all of them he has placed the reduction of the working day. A commitment that his Sumar party extracted from the PSOE in the investiture agreement, and that it will carry out. “Reducing the working day is possible and desirable because it represents a new right, a new hope, and we need the workers of the world to have hope,” he defended. Díaz has maintained that reducing work time “is about gaining time in life, having time to be happy,” and, ultimately, “to live better.”
Although she then welcomed the fact that the “process” carried out by her Ministry in recent years has been based on social dialogue – the vice president has made special mention of the labor reform agreed with the social agents –, (CEOE and Cepyme) their frontal rejection of this initiative. “Those who represent workers and employers have a voice to defend their interests, and the parties are given the opportunity to leave their mark there. But no one has the right to veto, neither does the employers,” Díaz asserted. According to social dialogue sources, the next meeting between Labor and the unions to agree on the final parameters of the reduction in hours is not scheduled yet.
Globalization
After also warning about gender inequalities in access to employment, as well as the violence that women still suffer in the workplace today, Díaz referred to automation already in the labor ecosystem, as tools that must act as “allies” for the hardest jobs, “which are the ones that make workers sick in the world.”
Once Díaz’s speech was over, the general secretaries of the UGT and CC OO unions, Pepe Álvarez and Unai Sordo, intervened. “What good is it for us to defend only workers in the field of labor rights, if when they have to go to a hospital there is no public health system that can care for them,” claimed Álvarez. “This global dimension is what is present today in the struggle of the country’s workers,” he added.
A claim that Sordo has also referred to. “The world of work has been in a permanent process of transformation linked to technical advances, but also due to different economic interests and sociopolitical perceptions about how the world and companies should be organized.” A new framework that, in the opinion of the CC OO leader, now has to regulate “through new forms of labor law,” among other facets.
