Paloma H. ​​Matellano Madrid

Madrid

Updated Friday, February 16, 2024-12:09

  • Equality The collapse of unions to negotiate equality plans will be aggravated by the new mobility plans

  • Unions The Government launches a statistic to praise employers and unions: 92% of workers are covered by an agreement

Conciliation continues to be the duty of women. This has been denounced by

CSIF

, the majority union of public employees, in a report published this Friday that shows that it is women who take on more job resignations to take care of children and dependent relatives. Using data from the

Active Population Survey (INE)

, the union condemns that

93%

of employees who work part-time to be able to reconcile are women, a total of 352,400 in Spain. For every

twelve women

who give up full-time employment to care for family members, there is

only one man

.

Likewise, of the almost 55,000 leaves requested to care for children or dependent people in 2023,

84%

corresponded to women. Thus, while men work on average about 34 hours a week, women do not reach 30, which causes them to have lower remuneration and contributes to increasing the gender wage gap. In 2022, women's annual salary was

20% lower

than that of men, an economic difference equivalent to them working 73 days a year for free.

Despite the efforts of the institutions in matters of equality, CSIF has warned that the distribution of domestic tasks and care remains very unbalanced. According to a survey by the Center for Sociological Research (CIS), women spend almost three hours a day on household chores, while men say they spend just over two hours on these tasks. When it comes to childcare, the difference between the two genders skyrockets: men dedicate less than four hours a day to them and women, almost seven.

This reality is also reflected in terms of occupation, since almost

90%

of the people who declare themselves inactive because they dedicate themselves to household chores are women. This is more than

2.8 million women

, compared to less than half a million men. Likewise, six out of every ten people who are unemployed are women and, although unemployment figures have improved in the last five years, the gender gap in this regard has barely changed. Even more striking is the difference in the unemployment statistics that occurs within Spanish marriages: of all the married people in the country, the number of unemployed women is close to double that of men. Thus, the gender gap in the number of unemployed is greater among married people than in the overall population.

The Government fails to comply with the regulations

The situation among Public Administration

workers

is not very different. According to the CSIF report, women employed in the public sector earn between 1 and 1.5 euros less per hour of work than men and their average annual salary is 8.5% lower. Furthermore, the union has denounced that the situation among civil servants, although "it should be exemplary for the labor market as a whole", shows important signs of inequality with, for example, twice as many temporary contracts for women as for men. In the Public Administration there are more than

700,000

women hired on a temporary basis.

Thus, CSIF considers that

the Government is failing to comply with regulations

in the public sphere because it does not have the equality plans and salary audits required by the Organic Law of Equality and two Royal Decrees. The union has also denounced that this regulation is not being complied with in the autonomous communities or in the city councils, where on multiple occasions "unjustified salary inequalities occur in concepts such as the specific complement, productivity or horizontal professional career."

"We ask the Government to get its act together," said the head of Equality at CSIF,

Eva Fernández

, at the press conference to present the report held this Friday. Among the union's demands is the "real and effective implementation of conciliation measures without loss of pay" and the approval of

specific pay audit regulations for the Public Administration

, as well as the implementation of Equality plans in all those companies and public administrations that do not yet have them.