The Labour Inspectorate has regularised eight lawyers of the General Confederation of Workers (CGT), who provided their services to the union as bogus self-employed workers in the territories of Madrid, Castilla-La Mancha and Extremadura, and has presented a liquidation report to Social Security for the amount of 372,585.41 euros that the organisation should have paid in contributions, according to the report of the Permanent Secretariat of CGT, presented to the plenary session on 28 June, to which elDiario has had access.
The penultimate chapter of this conflict dates back to the end of April last year, when the Inspectorate informed the union that a file had been opened. The procedure began, as these media have learned, following an anonymous complaint via the mailbox of the Labour and Social Security Inspectoratewhich aims to address situations of labour abuse to which workers may be exposed. In 2022, they were detected in this way approximately 3,520 violationsof which 3,056 jobs were created in the underground economy.
Last June, the Territorial Confederation of Madrid, Castilla-La Mancha and Extremadura submitted its financial situation and a series of urgent measures to its extraordinary plenary session. The most drastic was the dismissal, for objective reasons, of five of the fourteen members of staff, including the eight who were regularised ex officio by the Inspectorate and who, as confirmed to elDiario.es by the union's organisational secretary, Santiago de la Church, have now become effective. “The criterion was to choose the five people with the least seniority”, he explains in a telephone conversation. As a result, the employment relationship with three lawyers, a solicitor and a worker who carried out cleaning work has been terminated. A lack of equality in dismissals that the organisation attributes to the fact that “for more than ten years the criterion has been that women are hired first”, who are therefore the ones with the least seniority.
According to De la Iglesia, the eight people classified as workers had been providing services to the Territorial Confederation for a little over one to seven years. However, the head of the organization in Madrid, who has held this position since December, points out that the decision to outsource legal services was taken during a confederal plenary session in Alacant in June 2011. “It was agreed that they should be dealt with through commercial contracts. I may have an opinion, something else is what the union decides,” he justifies, warning that “others are considering whether to change that modality, because they are all the same.”
During that plenary session, the anarcho-syndicalist organization agreed that “the development of tasks that require technical support, such as lawyers, social graduates, economists, etc. will be done through a commercial contract or a service lease contract,” says the agreement document.
Outsourcing some services is common practice in many companies, which hire other companies for services such as cleaning, management or legal matters. The problem in this case is that the relationship, as interpreted by the Inspectorate, had more in common with a conventional employment relationship: these eight people could physically work for the union, and some did, they had a 'more or less' fixed salary. and paid holidays. One of them was even in charge of coordinating the rest.
“They had freedom of planning, even in choosing the cases, and they could serve other clients. They made us invoices, which is logical, but because we understand that it seems bad to us that self-employed people are in worse conditions, we still made the mistake of offering them a workplace in our facilities and even paying them for the month that they did not work on vacation. The logical thing is that you do not grant these kinds of facilities to a self-employed person,” says De la Iglesia.
The organization secretary admits that the situation of these workers has been discussed internally within the union. “There has been no concrete movement, except that it had to be reviewed, but we were not aware that we were doing so badly,” he admits. The Union of Professionals and Self-Employed (UPTA) estimated in 2022 that there will be more than 300,000 bogus self-employed workers in Spain, workers who provide their services as labor, but without enjoying the same rights and protections.
The ex officio regularization of the eight employees of CGT Madrid was possible thanks to a change in employment lawintroduced in 2023, which eliminated the obligation for the labor authority to initiate ex officio proceedings before the social courts. This means that the consequences of this abuse are brought forward, since the conversion to work takes place ex officio, without the need to impose a penalty, which can be deferred for two or three years. “As a union, we must defend this change in regulations so that workers are in the best situation,” admits De la Iglesia.
The liquidation of the social security, against which the union is going to file appeals and accusations, even knowing that it will be “difficult” for them to prosper, the possible sanctions and compensations for the dismissed workers and the conflicts with two of the organizations that They were part of the Confederation, the Transport Confederation, which had already been split, and the Banking Confederation, which is in full litigation, leaves the Territorial Confederation in a “tremendously diabolical” situation. The transport union was the one that contributed the most members to the group, around 5,500, with a corresponding decrease in the amounts.
“In January, after the congress (in December, when the new permanent secretariat was created), we already saw that we could not maintain the expenditure and we had to ask Confederal for help. We already warned that we would have to take measures, but our intention was to look for solutions internally,” explains the organization secretary, who admits a deficit of 30,000 euros per month. “The situation is untenable, we cannot maintain so many salaries when, logically, there are significantly fewer members,” he explains. Currently, the organization has around 11,500 registered members.
Waiting for a possible sanction, with the aim of rehiring the dismissed staff when the economic and internal situation allows it and aware of the crisis that having workers as bogus self-employed means for a union, those responsible for CGT Madrid, Castilla-La Mancha and Extremadura have convened a territorial congress for September to “try to find medium and long-term solutions.” “Let's see if we can solve all this little by little, but it will take time,” they admit.