Nadia Calviño: The Government leaves the approval of the Income Agreement for after the European Council | Economy

The final scheme of the Income Agreement promoted by the Government to face the high prices -especially energy prices- together with unions and employers’ associations will be subject to the measures adopted in the European Council, which will be held in Brussels between Thursday and on Friday of this week. This was stated by the First Vice President of the Government and Minister of Economic Affairs, Nadia Calviño, after the conclusion of the meeting held this Monday at the headquarters of her ministry; and that the general secretaries of the UGT and CC OO, Pepe Álvarez and Unai Sordo, have seconded.

“The meetings of the European Council are going to be key, where we hope that coordinated and concrete action measures will be adopted,” said the economic vice-president. “The situation is not easy, but we all agree that we must urgently curb the price of gas, of fuel. It cannot be that the citizens are paying for Putin’s war”, added Calviño. Despite the fact that these actions have not been detailed to deal with the inflation that has been caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, a framework of action has been defined that includes, according to the vice president, eight objectives “in the short and medium term”, which will be concentrated in five areas, and to which the Agreement for Employment and Collective Bargaining (AENC) that unions and employers are currently negotiating in parallel will be added.

The purposes of National Response Plan to the impact of the war ―which is how this agreement was finally baptized―, will be to “lower the prices of electricity, gas and fuels, protect the most vulnerable groups, support the sectors and companies most affected, guarantee price stability , guarantee supplies, protect financial stability, provide financial support through the Official Credit Institute (ICO) to companies, accelerate the deployment of recovery, address the energy transition, promote energy efficiency and reinforce cybersecurity”, he has indicated Calvino.

The five areas of action will address the European ecosystem, and the constant dialogue with the sectors on which inflation has had a greater impact, with the social agents, the parliamentary groups, and the autonomous communities and the City Councils.

Last Council of Ministers of the month

The times that the Government manages, therefore, lead with total certainty to the approval of this shock plan will take place in the last Council of Ministers of the month, next Tuesday. A date for which the AENC could also be defined, despite the fact that its final composition will depend, as union leaders have warned, on the direction taken by community decisions. “We have to see how the central problem of all this is addressed, which is nothing more than the regulation of energy prices, since the reduction of inflation and the recovery of purchasing power will depend on that,” he pointed out. Deaf. “Although everything depends on how it is resolved in the European Union, we have time to ask the State for measures based on its own powers,” Álvarez seconded.

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The approach of the unions does not go through a general lowering of taxes ―”it has not been shown that this is going to cause a drop in prices”, the leader of the CC OO has sentenced, but rather by rethinking the system for calculating energy prices. “In order for there to be something similar to an income agreement, it is absolutely necessary that forceful measures be taken to prevent the most expensive energy from continuing to be the one that determines the final price”, Sordo riveted.

Both unions, together with self-employed organizations such as Uatae, consumer organizations, Facua, and neighborhood organizations, CEAV, have called for mobilizations for this Wednesday, one day before the first session of the European Council is held.