PP and Vox debate: sick leave, pensions, and working hours

PP and Vox: the labor package brewed away from the spotlight

The start of the conversation leaves no room for doubt: against the country's major problems, the proposal attributed to the PP is for companies to grant sick leave, while Vox's proposal targets pensions. Together, according to this reading, they push in the same direction: reversing consolidated labor rights, hindering reduced working hours—with the suspicion that some might end up expanding them—and questioning the Interprofessional Minimum Wage (SMI). The argument put forward is that the SMI cannot be arbitrary due to its direct effect on inflation, although it is conceded that a minimum exists for social justice: without it, poor bosses would pay in peanuts. The blacklist also includes the elimination of entry and exit work registration. And a question floats without an answer: what about the self-employment rate?

Absenteeism and the sick leave business

The most developed point is sick leave. It is argued that the proposal is outrageous, using a comparison: there are specific mutual funds for civil servants—MUFACE, ISFAS, and MUGEJU—supported by public agreements, which grant sick leave to their affiliates without public audits and without the public health system being able to say anything. The uncomfortable corollary is that the highest labor absenteeism occurs precisely in the public sector, not the private, and without oversight or control. With this starting point, handing over sick leave management to private employers ceases to seem like a whim and begins to read as a transfer of power.

Pensions: the only point where cracks appear in the narrative

Here the tone changes. The public pension system is theoretically maintained with current workers' contributions, but has decades of deficits and continuous contributions from other funds, collected from other taxes, without balancing and with growing debt. Those who defend private plans as an alternative have, on paper, an argument not dismantled by slogans. The problem is that the discussion stops just where it becomes interesting: what happens to those who cannot contribute enough for a private plan.

The opposition that is not opposition

There is a current that does not discuss the substance but the form. The right does not oppose and mounts poor electoral campaigns, it is said: it has a long list of topics to wear down the government and is incapable of doing so. The proposed recipe is simple and brutal: monothematic campaign, continuous attack on executive policies, without entering the debate proposed by the adversary. Everyone knows the incompetence of the right-wing opposition, and again they would go in that direction.

Useful vote and angry vote

On a personal level, the range is wide. There is someone who has endured eight years of what he calls invasion and can no longer stand it: he will give Vox a chance, and if there were more useful representation to the right, that is where his vote would go. There is someone who would vote for Vox even if its leader appeared live eating newly baptized babies, because that is what the people across the aisle do regardless of their leader. And there is someone who sentences that any rubbish is better than the PSOE. Opposite, the warning that you have had eight years, plus those of Zapatero.

The complete calculation, with the breakdown of each item and the effect on the paycheck, is what remains outside these lines. That is where the matter ceases to be a slogan and begins to be money.