Confebask questions ELA's contribution to the country, and Lakuntza replies that it gets "the most and the best agreements."
Confebask and the ELA union have had a public debate this Thursday following harsh criticism from employers "president Tamara Yagüe at an event in Bilbao.
Yagüe has questioned ELA's union work and said the union uses it as "the only way to fight , to the detriment of dialogue and negotiation. "
In addition, Confebask has stated that he will defend himself in court for the complaint lodged by the ELA and LAB unions against employers for not negotiating a minimum wage for the Basque Autonomous Community.
In response, ELA's Secretary General, Mitxel Lakuntza, has replied that it is his union that achieves "the most and best agreements" and has accused the business organization of maintaining a "retrograde" and "authoritarian" attitude.
In a statement, he warned that the fight and the proclamation of his own minimum wage "has come to stay" and added that Confebask, like the Basque Government, is wrong if he believes that such an important issue can be ignored.
Lakuntza has stated that the Basque employers "are aware of the contribution that the ELA union makes to society. All it has to do is look into the causes of its anger to find an answer," he said.
He has argued that ELA is "the union that achievesthe largest and best agreements (250 on average each year) and higher wage increases than those of the other unions (for example, in 2023, the average wage increase in the agreements signed by ELA was 5.76%, while in the agreements not signed by ELA it was 4.17%) ".
The trade union leader has defended the union's work against the "closure" of employers and accused it of "refusing to raise wages and in particular to negotiate the minimum wage".
Lakuntza has recalled that it gives "legitimacy" to ELA to be the first Basque union, with more than 40% representation in the ACV and 104,000 members, "to organize thousands of workers in workplaces every day, to overcome the blockade of employers through strikes and to achieve achievements and agreements that are otherwise not possible."
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