The meeting that the Ministry of Health had scheduled for this Wednesday with the strike committee, made up of the National Confederation of Medical Unions (CESM) and the Andalusian Medical Union (SMA), did not last even an hour, to try to reach a common point on the draft framework statute and put an end to the strikes that took place throughout the country last week. The two organizations left the table after confirming that negotiations with the government are at an impasse: They refuse to adhere to the prior verbal agreement concluded this Monday by the ministry of Mónica García with the unions in the negotiation area and insist on the creation of a specific status for the medical profession.
According to sources from the strike committee, what the ministry offered them this Wednesday were lentils: the only option that would have been transferred to them was to adhere to the verbal agreement agreed on Monday with the other unions. ““Health considered the negotiation broken because it already had a pre-agreement with Ambito”they emphasize. The CESM and the SMA have already announced on Tuesday that they would participate in the meeting with a “desire for dialogue”, but demanding that Health offer them a closed calendar of meetings in which they could negotiate the demands demanded by the medical community. According to what they had warned on the eve of the meeting, if they did not reach an agreement with the ministry, they would opt for “intensify open conflict” and call for an “indefinite national strike”. The two organizations will decide in the coming hours on “new mobilizations” which will be convened throughout the country “to show the collective response in this escalation of the conflict”.
For its part, the Ministry of Health regretted that the strike committee “does not join the consensus and opts for confrontation”. “They left the negotiating table without giving a response to the formal proposal presented by the ministry nor to the prior agreement concluded in the negotiation area”, reproaches the department of Mónica García. According to a press release, during the meeting this Wednesday, the ministry team invited the two entities to adhere to the prior agreement concluded Monday with the trade union organizations that make up the negotiation area —SATSE-FSES, FSS-CCOO, UGT, CSIF and CIG-Saúde— in exchange for the cancellation of strikes planned for January.
An agreement which, in principle, must still be ratified on Friday for it to be effective, and which takes up three key points of the union demands: the ordinary working day of 35 hours per week, access to partial and voluntary early retirement in certain cases and the negotiation in a specific agreement, outside the Statute, of updated remuneration which accompanies the new professional classification system included in the draft Statute.
According to Santé, “none of the proposals presented received a response, thus unilaterally breaking the dialogue process” during a meeting in which they criticized the unions for choosing to maintain “a pressure strategy” based on the requirement to have a “specific and parallel” negotiating table different from that of the Negotiating Area.
The committee: “They only wanted to appear willing to dialogue”
But the strike committee interprets it very differently. CESM and SMA assure that they have maintained an “attitude of negotiation” and a “genuine desire for dialogue” to reach agreements “until the last moment”. Medical unions accuse Health, which they accuse of “bad faith in negotiations” and “lack of truthfulness and commitment” for accusing them of “getting out of the table”while, they say, it was the ministry which decided to blow up the agenda which had been set for this Thursday.
As detailed in a statement sent to the media shortly after the meeting, it was the Secretary of State for Health himself, Javier Padilla, who announced from the start that “the ministry considers all negotiations broken”, since they had already reached an agreement on Monday with the other unions. Mónica García’s “number two” would then have informed them that “two parallel lines of dialogue were not going to be maintained”, as requested by the organizations. For the commission, the ministry never had a real desire to reach an agreement with them. They assure that both Thursday’s meeting and that of December 11 “were solely intended to demobilize union leaders and seem to have a non-existent desire for dialogue.”
About The Author
