Garzón asks to raise wages, moderate benefits and "make work compatible with life"

MADRID, 1 May. (EUROPA PRESS) -

The Minister of Consumption and federal coordinator of Izquierda Unida, Alberto Garzón, has urged to raise wages, moderate the "abusive" benefits of companies and "make work compatible with life" so that workers can "develop a project that deserves the sorrow".

This has been underlined in statements to the media before the demonstration for May 1 in Madrid, where he has claimed that the labor reform has meant "a paradigm shift" after which "it is understood that the solution of the problems of Spain goes through a wage increase, the improvement of collective bargaining and the strengthening of the organized working class".

"We have to continue deploying and expanding this paradigm shift over time, and we also have to continue incorporating and expanding the qualitative element, we have to reconsider work in all its integral vision of life to understand that the working class can work to live and not necessarily live to work", has defended.

For Garzón, it is necessary to "understand the nature of the time dedicated to life. "We are a society that needs to make work compatible with life, to put life at the center, to put care at the center and of being capable of questioning ways of life like the current ones in which society and the working class do not have time to take care of either the smallest beings in families or the oldest beings in families", he added in this regard .

In his opinion, this dynamic is a "social problem" that has to be resolved "with regulation" and before which "this new paradigm of wage increases and a new way of understanding work, very different from the neoliberal form that has accompanied since the recovery of democracy until very few years ago".

On the other hand, Garzón has emphasized the motto of the demonstration on May 1, 'Raise wages, lower prices, distribute benefits', which he considers "very successful."

In this sense, he stressed that "it is about understanding that inflation processes are pushed and spurred on by abusive increases in business margins". For Garzón, companies "take advantage of circumstances experienced in recent years to increase profits on the backs of the purchasing power of working families."

"This is something that we have to be able to solve, especially from the Government, where we put the interest of working families first," he acknowledged, to highlight that it is also necessary to "design better ways to redistribute that wealth."

This redistribution passes, from the point of view of consumption, through "prices", he specified, to conclude by insisting on "raising wages" and "moderating benefits".