Unicaja intends to take another step to leave behind its previous turbulent stage and has ratified this Tuesday Isidro Rubiales as the new CEO in an extraordinary meeting that has not been free of noise either. The majority unions in the entity –CCOO, UGT, CSIF and Cesica– They have called for protests yesterday and today to demand greater diligence from the new management team when it comes to improving the salary and working conditions of a staff. “We had high expectations with the new CEO, but things are going slower than expected,” union sources assure this newspaper.
The workers’ representatives demand a standardization of remuneration among all the group’s workers in order to put an end to the divergences that exist between employees from the different entities that made up the group. Liberbank and Unicaja itself. They also want “real progress in equal pay and in the occupation of positions of greater responsibility, which is still resisted in the upper echelons of the entity”; a salary standardization that allows them to reduce the gap with the sector average and demand a greater provision of people and means to improve the quality of service to customers and the quality of the work environment for the employees themselves.
“The negotiations are open but they are not going at the pace we expected to improve the toxic work environment that we continue to have,” say the sources consulted.
Between the workers and their representatives there is a certain disappointment over Rubiales’ role. The new CEO met with the union organizations shortly after being appointed, something that his predecessor, Manuel Menendez, he never wanted to do. That meeting is a gesture valued by the unions, but now they demand to transform the “good words” of the meetings into actions. “We thought that the new CEO was a breath of fresh air, but it is more of the same,” they lament.
When they talk about more of the same, the unions allude to the “commercial pressure” that they say they endure in the branches to meet the objectives and repeat the “toxicity” that according to them is felt in the entity’s offices. “The work environment continues to be unsustainable,” they complain. They assure that they have been facing a “complicated situation” since the merger with Liberbank, but they celebrate that at least the company has opened itself to dialogue. “Before that was unthinkable. Now at least we are negotiating,” they say and, although they understand that things cannot change from one day to the next, they regret that the talks have remained stuck. “We have seven different salary realities. If there is money to remunerate the directors, there must be money for everyone,” they rebuke.