Yolanda Díaz guarantees the continuity of the ERTE in the Canary Islands "as long as they are essential"

The Second Vice President and Minister of Labor, Yolanda Díaz, has guaranteed this Wednesday that the ERTEs will remain in the Canary Islands as long as they are "essential" because they are "the best tool" in situational situations such as the current ones.

Díaz made these statements after signing with the Canarian President, Ángel Víctor Torres, the Comprehensive Employment Plan of the Canary Islands for 2022, with an allocation of 42 million euros, which will allow employment or training to about 5,000 Canarians, according to forecasts.

"I want to give certainty to workers and companies, we are working on the design of the new ERTEs," said the minister, who stressed that of the specific Employment Plan for the volcanic eruption of La Palma for 60 million euros, 44.3 million have already been executed, which have allowed the hiring of 1,671 people.

The vice president included the ERTEs launched in Spain during the pandemic as an example that for the first time in democracy a crisis has been managed "differently", which allowed a fall in GDP of 11% to only translate into a fall of 1.5% in employment, thus failing to meet all the negative forecasts made by international organizations.

This management has allowed the unemployment rate in Spain to be at 13.6%, a figure that "without being positive is the best there has been," said Díaz. In the case of the Canary Islands, the ERTEs came to protect 238,000 workers, with a financing of 1,600 million euros.

"The economic and social crisis derived from the pandemic has been especially hard for the Canary Islands, because tourism was paralyzed, and in the last quarter of 2021 the volcanic eruption in La Palma was added, but there has been a commitment as a country between all administrations to prevent the damage from becoming structural," he stressed.

In addition, Yolanda Díaz added that she knows "well" the structural needs of the Canary Islands and "as a minister, she must attend to those who have the most needs", and also stressed that measures such as the increase in the Minimum Interprofessional Wage and the labor reform have a special impact on the archipelago.

In this regard, she made a call to the Canarian society to make good use of the possibilities of the labor reform with the deployment of the modality of hiring fixed-term workers to overcome job insecurity. "If there are precarious jobs, there are precarious companies," she clarified.

Yolanda Díaz stressed that the Comprehensive Employment Plan of the Canary Islands (PIEC) has ambitious objectives and has been worked on and continues to be worked on so that it can be applied with more agility and efficiency, "more quickly" and with more room for its execution, as demanded by social agents and Canarian institutions.

The PIEC explained, "focuses on the diversification of employment, on improving the qualification and promoting the versatility and inter-island mobility, as well as on labor stability. At the same time, it will serve to fight against the underground economy and for the integral training and qualification of young people, the long-term unemployed and the most vulnerable people".

For his part, the President of the Canary Islands, Ángel Víctor Torres, stressed that in the worst of the pandemic, it was achieved that there was an additional provision for the Canary Islands in the case of the ERTEs, since it was the region most affected economically and socially by the pandemic crisis.

Torres recalled that the PIEC has been recovered since 2020, assured that it is already consolidated in the State budgets and stressed that it is now applied "advancing the deadlines", something essential to hire and train about 5,000 people, most of them from vulnerable families.