Pamplona (EFE).- The Union of Professionals and Self-Employed Workers and UGT Navarra have warned this Thursday of the loss of 232 small businesses in Navarra in the last year and the forecast that there will be 500 in 2023, 200 of them bars and restaurants.
The general secretary of the UGT in Navarra, Jesús Santos, the president of UPTA in Spain, Eduardo Abad, and the head of organization of UPTA Navarra, Javier Marzo, explained this Thursday at a press conference the need to “redistribute wealth” to that the self-employed are not left behind.
Santos has highlighted the value of the group of self-employed workers who account for 90% of the productive fabric in Navarra and 20% of GDP. The general secretary of the UGT has affirmed that this sector needs help after the price escalation and has valued the new contribution system based on real income, a measure “the result of social dialogue”.
“65% of the self-employed in Navarra will make a lower contribution effort than in 2022 and those who enter the least will see their quota reduced,” he explained.
Abad has expressed his concern about the loss of small businesses that “it is impossible for them to compete with the large oligopolies” and has highlighted the new “fairer” contribution system.
Minimum wage and competitive capacity
The president of UPTA has explained that it is “indecent” that employers do not support the increase in the Minimum Interprofessional Wage and has pointed out that in Navarra, 90% of the self-employed who have workers under their charge already pay more than 1,200 euros, for which is “not a real problem”.
“The banks and oil companies have had the best income in their history and do not understand that if there is no redistribution of wealth, workers do not have purchasing power and this results in the closure of small businesses,” he criticized.
In this sense, he has denounced that given the “offers from the big brands at any time of the year, small establishments have no competitive power and do not have digitization tools”, which means that “they cannot compete” and have to close .
Abad has also commented that Navarra has a “problem with the false self-employed”, since there is an “excess”. “They are increasingly outsourcing the services that were previously provided by staff workers and thus a destructuring of the traditional labor market is taking place,” he added.
In addition, he has warned of the “precariousness of self-employment” in examples such as “package carriers” who “charge per package and therefore run from one place to another, which is a problem of road safety.”
UPTA will meet this Thursday with the president of Navarra, María Chivite, and the Minister of Economy and Finance, Elma Saiz, to deliver a “road map, with the transformation of self-employment 2023-27”.