Big Spanish Labor Union Facing an Investigation on Misuse of Funding
By RAPHAEL MINDER
Published: December 26, 2013
MADRID — Spain’s shrinking labor unions have struggled during the economic crisis to put a brake on the government’s austerity measures and help reduce record unemployment.
Marcial Guillen/European Pressphoto Agency
A rally last month against budget cuts in Spain.
Sergio Perez/Reuters
Cándido Méndez, secretary general of the General Union of Workers, far right, with Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy, center.
Now, one of the country’s two main unions is facing a crisis of its own. It is accused by the regional government of Andalusia, Spain’s largest region, of misusing at least 1.8 million euros ($2.46 million) in public money that was intended for unemployed workers. The money was said to be used to pay for events and gifts to union officials.
The union has denied any wrongdoing. But the scandal has already led to the resignation of the head of the Andalusian chapter of the union, the left-leaning General Union of Workers, or U.G.T., and a judge has opened a criminal investigation into the chapter’s finances.
The investigation started over a month ago, when the regional government said it had identified $2.46 million of misused subsidies and demanded reimbursement. In recent days, the regional government said it had widened its investigation and was checking another batch of suspicious subsidy claims by the union amounting to €7.5 million.
“This is certainly the biggest case of corruption in the history of our unions,” said Roberto Miño Reig, a lawyer at the firm Cremades & Calvo-Sotelo in Madrid. “The unions should have been playing a key role in this crisis, but instead they have lost a lot of prestige.”
The case against the Andalusian chapter of the General Union of Workers comes as many Spanish institutions have found themselves linked to corruption investigations, from the monarchy to the governing Popular Party of Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy.
“All of Spain’s representative institutions are under pressure, because what the crisis has done is bring to the surface a lot of practices that might have been tolerated before, but now no longer,” Mr. Miño Reig said.
Asked to comment on the problems at its Andalusian chapter, the national office of the General Union of Workers said it had nothing to add to what its secretary general, Cándido Méndez, said in an interview this month with the Spanish newspaper El País. Mr. Méndez said that 2013 had been “a tough year,” but insisted that his national leadership knew nothing about possible wrongdoing by an Andalusian chapter that was “very jealous of its autonomy.”
Mr. Méndez also argued that the union’s troubles should not be compared to other corruption investigations, including a slush fund investigation that has landed at the doorstep of Mr. Rajoy. That case focuses on whether Luis Bárcenas, the former treasurer of the Popular Party, made illegal payments to Mr. Rajoy and other senior conservative politicians by using kickbacks from builders and other companies.
“The U.G.T. has a membership of one million people and very healthy roots in the workplaces, so one should avoid generalizing,” Mr. Méndez said in the interview with El País. “There is an element of harassment toward unions that goes back a long way, but it is also true that there are problems that we need to confront.”
The combined membership in Spanish unions has fallen to about 2.8 million from 3.2 million in 2007, before the financial crisis. Union membership now stands at 15.9 percent of the Spanish work force, above the rates of only Poland, Estonia and France among European Union nations, according to a recent study by the Instituto de Estudios Económicos, a Spanish research institute.
Even though Spanish unions do not publish their financial accounts, they have also suffered from cuts in government subsidies as part of Mr. Rajoy’s recent austerity budgets.
José Ramón Pin, a professor who specializes in public administration and labor issues at the IESE business school in Madrid, said the crisis had revealed “the very weak financial structure of the unions, which has forced them to look for increasingly murkier sources of funding.” The final step, he said, is “to move from institutional flaws to personal corruption.”
- 1
- 2
No comments:
Post a Comment