Seat workers will go to the polls on June 29 to vote on the collective agreement preliminary agreement that the company has sealed with the unions present in the works council. The document includes the exit conditions of the 1,330 people who will be surplus to the company due to the drop in workload and SEAT’s commitment to seek the allocation of a large vehicle so that it can be manufactured at the Martorell plant (Barcelona), so that the specialization in the small car that the facilities will assemble for Cupra and Skoda can be balanced.
The new agreement is retroactive, its validity will apply on January 1, 2022, and will last until 2026, a period in which Seat faces one of its most relevant restructurings: the adaptation of Martorell to the electric vehicle, the loss of load of work that this will entail, and that same impact on the El Prat plant, currently specialized in gearboxes, an element that has no future with battery-powered vehicles.
Exits in the company will be applied through non-traumatic measures, through voluntary resignations and early retirement from the age of 61. Those who decide to follow this path will keep 70% of their salary and premium and 100% of their contributions to the pension plan until retirement age, 65 years of age.
One of the points on which the unions pressed was the commitment to look for a second electric vehicle platform. His fear was that the Barcelona factory would lose profitability if it fully specialized in the more modest electric vehicle platform of the Volkswagen Group. For this reason, they argued that it was necessary to achieve a larger model, seeking a situation similar to the current one: the vehicles manufactured in Barcelona (all of them with combustion) are small, but larger ones are manufactured in parallel, such as the Cupra Formentor.
The preliminary agreement of the twentieth collective agreement includes a condition on the payment of the CPI for 2022 if inflation exceeds 3% (8.3% in May). Half will be paid in equal parts over four years, while the other part will be paid in 2026 if there is no assignment of a new model in January 2026.
The text also includes the possibility that part of the current Seat workers can move to work at the battery cell factory that the Volkswagen Group plans to start up in Sagunto (Valencia).
