The president of the CEOE, Antonio Garamendi, has reiterated his desire to make regulatory changes to make employment compatible with a subsidy, so that the unemployed are not deterred from accepting a job. The president of the employers’ association insists on his search for new ways to encourage employment and combat the lack of labor that, as Cepyme reported yesterday, is hindering the productivity of SMEs.
During his speech at the closing of the Cepyme conference on the problem of vacancies in Spain, Garamendi assured that one of the great challenges of the labor market is to achieve a “balance” between employment and the aid that the unemployed receive. “There has to be a regulatory change where employment is compatible with the subsidy, work has to be made compatible with active unemployment (…) and we will also have to talk about why, among various offers, people say no,” He has pointed.
Garamendi has assured that he “understands” that when work is short-term, there are people who, receiving social protection “which is otherwise necessary”, do not accept employment so as not to lose that aid. “We will have to work with it and review the regulations,” said the business leader. “We are currently together with the Ministry of Social Security and Inclusion and together with Cáritas carrying out a project in this sense in certain provinces, at the moment it is a pilot, to see how we can continue working in this space,” he noted.
Garamendi has stated that the issue of vacancies in Spain is of “urgent necessity” for the future of Spain and has warned that from emptied Spain we will move to vacant Spain. “In many territorial organizations what is being proposed is the need to bring people. In the Basque Country we are talking about 100,000 people in a very few years,” he pointed out. The leader of the CEOE has pointed out that this situation not only affects Spain, but also Europe. In the words of the president of the European Commission, Úrsula Von der Leyen, “instead of millions of people looking for jobs, there are millions of jobs that people are looking for.”
Flexible regulatory framework to guarantee employability
Along with the balance between employment and aid, Garamendi has pointed out that the other two major challenges of the labor market have to do with the “shortage” of skills and labor and the need to facilitate business. For the president of the CEOE, it is “very complicated” to meet the needs of companies while training is not put in order. Furthermore, he has advocated for a “flexible, safe and predictable regulatory framework” to improve people’s employability.
Garamendi wants the link between companies, education and training to be strengthened, an “in-depth” reform of public employment services that encourages public-private collaboration; link active and passive employment policies; an adequate integration of the level of care with the Minimum Living Income and facilitating its compatibility with work. The president of the CEOE has also opted to reform the current model of vocational training for employment and has requested that training in occupational risk prevention be subsidized, an issue that the employers’ association will address tomorrow at the meeting of its Committee and the Board. Directive.
“That decision, we don’t know from whom, that training is not eligible for credit when we are paying those Social Security contributions to make it eligible for credit, does not make sense (…) Training is as important for training as training “that we have to constantly consider regarding occupational risks,” he concluded.
