While Health is holding a meeting with the doctors’ strike committee which is taking place these days throughout Spain to try to bring positions closer together, the unions working on the reform of the Framework Statute with the ministry are also expressing their discomfort with … negotiation. The UGT, CCOO, CSIF, Satse and CIG-Saúde submitted a letter to the Congress of Deputies and to Moncloa, addressed to the President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, in which they denounce the “disinterest” of Mónica García in the application of a rule “that benefits all personnel” of public health.
Thus, in the letter, the trade union organizations inform the President of the Government of the strike that they have called from January 27 for all health workers and which will take place every Tuesday. The strike, they explain, is due to the fact that the negotiation with Health, “both in form and substance”, was not “at all satisfactory” during the time they worked on the text.
Minister Mónica García recently insisted that her proposal for the Framework Statute covers all the matters in which her department has competence, but there are other issues, says the head of Health, that she cannot address, such as the reduction of working hours or early retirement. The unions recall in this sense that they have repeatedly called on Health to lead “coordinated government action” including other ministries in the negotiations.
Furthermore, the organizations go further and insinuate that “the problem” goes beyond the Ministry of Health and affects the entire government. The unions report that, due to the lack of leadership in Mónica García’s department, they have also sent letters to the Ministry of Labor, the Ministry of Digital Transformation and Civil Service, the Ministry of Inclusion, Social Security and Migration and the Ministry of Finance to ask them to intervene in the negotiation to resolve these problems without having received a response from any of them.
Health “lack of truth”
The unions insist that in the latest draft framework statute sent by Health, the ministry “misses the truth” because it “does not include, as it says, all the negotiated changes and improvements” in the scope of application. They also deny that it is not true that the text is negotiated “more than 99 percent”, as Mónica García has repeatedly stated.
In the letter to Sánchez, the unions highlight their demands: that the proposed new professional classification also involves new salaries, access to early and partial retirement and the reduction of working hours to 35 hours per week. The ministry, they emphasize, has made “totally unacceptable” proposals on these points.
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