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INT’L LABOUR DAY-SPAIN: Second Class Workers

Alicia Fraerman

MADRID, Apr 28 2006 (IPS) - In Spain and the rest of the European Union (EU), the right to work does not apply equally to everyone. Temporary and informal sector employment, which mainly involves immigrants, forces a large portion of the population to live in poverty, without social security coverage, and facing the risk of deportation because their papers are not in order.

Figures released Friday by the National Institute of Statistics (INE) show that in the first quarter of 2006, the total number of unemployed in Spain rose by 94,500 people, to a total of 1.9 million, or 8.62 percent of the economically active population. (Spain has a total population of 44 million.

But the unemployment rate stands at 6.81 percent for men and 12.22 percent for women, and 12.33 percent for foreign nationals and 9.0 percent for citizens.

The INE reported that since the first quarter of 2005, jobs were lost in agriculture and industry, and gained in the service and construction industries.

Of the total of nearly 15.9 million wage earners in Spain in the first quarter of the year, close to 10.6 million had permanent labour contracts, while 5.29 million were temporary workers.

The INE figures back the arguments of trade unions, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and immigrant groups, which complain that a large part of the immigrants residing in Spain have temporary contracts or work in the informal economy.

Under a new agreement that the government, trade unions and business hope to sign next week, workers who have strung together two or more temporary contracts that have lasted at least 24 months altogether would be considered permanent employees, and would thus qualify for complete social and labour benefits.

NGOs estimate the number of undocumented workers in Spain at 700,000.

Although undocumented immigrants have no right to social security, they are eligible for free access to public health services.

This week, 10 immigrant organisations created the State Federation of Associations of Immigrants and Refugees in Spain (FERINE). In its first public statement, the new umbrella group called for the repeal of the current law on aliens and the passage of a new law that would recognise the labour rights of undocumented immigrants.

They also called a demonstration in downtown Madrid on May 1, International Labour Day, under the theme “we want to unite: native or foreigner, we are all part of the same working class”.

Socialist Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero is clearly sensitive to the problem. In a recent interview with the Madrid daily El Mundo he said a projected constitutional reform would include a clause referring to immigrants, although he did not elaborate on the changes to be adopted.

Miguel González, coordinator of the Right to Citizenship section in the Plataforma Coordinadora de ONG de Acción Social (platform of social action NGOs), told IPS that it is not a question of merely recognising another right.

Immigrants “should have the right to citizenship, like the rest of the residents of Spain, whether or not they were born here, and should enjoy the same social benefits.”

Among those rights, he said, should be the right to vote in all elections in Spain, and not only in municipal elections, in which immigrants – “but only those with their papers in order” – can already vote.

For his part, Víctor Sáez, president of FERINE, noted that there are an estimated one million undocumented immigrants today in Spain, people “whose rights are infringed, because they do not have access to a fair wage, to social recognition as a person because they cannot reunite their families, or to a retirement pension because they have no labour contract, even if they work from dawn to dusk.”

While FERINE and other NGOs and trade unions demand equal rights for immigrants, whether or not they are employed, their situation is governed by a law on aliens that makes it possible to deport any migrant living in Spain without the proper documents.

Meanwhile, surveys show that immigration is seen by Spaniards as the country’s second-most pressing problem, after terrorism, when “a year and a half ago it was considered the seventh biggest problem,” said Rodrigo Gavilán, spokesman for the non-governmental State Police Confederation.

“If we were to interview people at random in the street and ask them about immigration, the only thing they would say is that it is a source of crime, takes jobs from Spaniards, and that immigrants are always in the hospitals” covered by the social security system, even though many of them do not pay into the system as they work on the black market, said Gavilán.

Nevertheless, quite a different picture emerges from a study conducted in the Autonomous Community of Madrid (one of the 17 autonomous communities or regions into which Spain is divided) by nine professors at the National Autonomous University of Madrid. The study revealed that of the 950,000 immigrants living in this region of Spain in 2005 (representing 16 percent of the total population), 32 percent did not have their papers in order. It also concluded that for every euro that the autonomous community spends on immigrants, they give back 12.

Immigrants who are legal residents account for around 10 percent of the region’s gross domestic product (GDP), an amount equivalent to some 14.3 billion euros (17.8 billion dollars) in 2005, while contributing 1.1 billion euros (1.37 billion dollars) to the state coffers through taxes, despite the fact that they earn 30 percent less than native-born Spaniards on average. In the case of undocumented immigrants, the difference in wages can reach up to 50 percent.

And for undocumented immigrants working in the countryside, the wage gap is even greater, stressed a spokesman for the Trade Union Confederation of Workers’ Commissions (CCOO, one of Spain’s two largest labour federations, with links to the Communist Party).

When it comes to all of the Spanish Autonomous Communities combined, the report shows that immigrants – most of them Latin American û occupy one out of every six job positions, but only one out of every three has an official labour contract.

In a press release issued ahead of International Labour Day, the CCOO stressed that “the precariousness of the labour market continues to be a pending issue in our country, which heads up the European Union with the highest rate of seasonal work, a phenomenon that especially affects women and young people, and has been aggravated by the massive incorporation of immigrants into the workforce.”

Both the CCOO and the other major trade union federation, the General Union of Workers (UGT) also underlined that they will work together “to eliminate the social plight of deaths and suffering that affect people who emigrate from African countries in extremely high-risk conditions, as well as the exploitation exercised by the people-smuggling mafias.”

To more forcefully communicate their message, the CCOO and UGT are organising 46 demonstrations to be held in 46 Spanish cities on May 1, under the theme “For peace, stable employment in equal conditions.”

The two labour organisations also issued a “serious warning” to international institutions and democratic governments throughout the world regarding the urgent need to correct the current global economic process, which “fosters the absence of respect for basic human rights” in some parts of the world.

They also voiced an emphatic demand for an end to temporary work contracts.