Fátima Báñez, president of the CEOE Foundation: “The administrations should not get in the way, they should walk hand in hand with the companies”

The former Minister of Labour and Social Security, who served under the PP for eight years, has participated in the Amephu luncheon in Monzón.

The former first female Minister of Labour and the one who served the longest under the People’s Party governments, from 2011 to 2018, who is currently president of the CEOE Foundation, Fátima Báñez, spoke today on employment, business and social commitment at the luncheon organized by the Association of Women Entrepreneurs of the Province of Huesca (Amephu).  The event was held at Hotel Mas Monzón and brought together about 80 businesswomen and businessmen and many of the regional PP leaders.

The event was attended by the mayor of Monzón, Isaac Claver, the president of Amephu, Carmen Rodríguez, the president of the Cinca Medio business association, Ángel Mas, CEOS Cepyme Huesca, Fernando Luna, and the president of the CEOE in Aragón, Miguel Mazo, CEOE Miguel Mazo, president of CEOE Aragón and the president of Cinca Medio Angel Mas, and several company directors from different parts of the region.

The politician, economist and jurist from Huelva, international advisor to Iberdrola and linked to several associations committed to sustainability, gave her economic snapshot of the current situation in Spain, which is facing “a polycrisis”, and defended the importance of the role of companies “that generate employment, the main tool for generating welfare and guaranteeing the public pension system.”

“We are facing a very uncertain scenario and dealing with a polycrisis. We have a combination of unfavorable situations: high inflation, high interest rates that complicate financing due to the tightening of the European Bank’s monetary policy, slowing economic growth, high costs for companies to produce goods and services, high unemployment rates, 13%, the local unemployment rate is at 9%, the invasion of Ukraine, geopolitical tensions between China and the U.S. This is the hotchpotch that Spanish society is in”. These polycrisis elements are coupled with the transition “from an industrial economy to a digital and knowledge economy, a low-carbon green economy and the great demographic change. All these challenges that we’ve been facing for the past 5 years are still present today”.

Against this background there is, in Báñez’s opinion, an unchangeable reality that guarantees the welfare of the country: companies and the generation of employment. “Companies are a very important part of Spanish society and, at a time when the role of companies in Spanish society is being questioned more than ever, we must emphasize the role they play in generating social welfare,” said the president of the Spanish Employers’ Foundation. In terms of data, she indicated that companies provide 82% of Aragon’s employment and 50% of the Community’s wealth. “Companies have a relevant role that is acknowledged in the Constitution as freedom of enterprise. And so do business associations and trade unions, they all contribute to design the Spanish policy and help build our future”.

Despite the current polycrisis, Fátima Báñez pointed out that companies “are creating jobs”, although she regretted that we have not yet managed to return to pre-COVID GDP levels, an endeavor in which “we are among the last in Europe. And although we have a workforce of 20 million people, we are not back to the number of hours that were worked before the pandemic”.  She noted that there are “15,000 companies fewer than in pre-covid times”, so “we must continue working together with the companies to create new ones”.

As for employment, despite the fact that there are more than 20 million people working, the second best figure since before the 2007 crisis, there are still 3.5 million people in Spain “who want to work and there are vacancies to be filled: more than 145,000 in ICT, 25,000 in cybersecurity, 200,000 in construction, 85,000 in social services, we need 5,000 and 10,000 truck drivers, there are 3,500 vacancies that are not covered at the moment in Aragon. So, we will have to do better, the administration, the companies, and the workers”.

In this sense, in order for companies to generate more employment and for new firms to emerge, Báñez’s recipe is “to allow freedom to work. The different administrations must not stand in the way but accompany entrepreneurs along the way. What was not stand in the way mean? To value them and acknowledge them as an asset of the civil society, to remove obstacles, to avoid unnecessary burdens”. “Companies and business organizations are committed because our aim is to create wealth and employment in order to create a better Spain. To this end, we want to be respected and we’d like to see entrepreneurship made easier, by reducing bureaucracy, simplifying the procedures to start-up a business and for tax rates to decrease”. In this regard, she pointed out the measure adopted in the Ministry of Labour of the “flat rate of 50 euros” for entrepreneurs under the age of 35 who want to be self-employed, which ” prevented the black economy and was a measure complemented by the communities to create new companies.”

On the role of women as heads of companies, Báñez was optimistic. “The world is changing and, today, we have good news: there are more women working than ever before in our country. Women are massively joining the labour market. Since 2014, 6 out of 10 new entrepreneurs in Spain are women. And that is good because women find it harder to become entrepreneurs, and the stability of a company led by a woman is long-lasting, a safe and successful venture.”

In this regard, she mentioned some of the conclusions of a report prepared by the CEOE Foundation, which will be released in the near future, on the importance of women as company leaders. “What would happen if women were to head SMEs? GDP would increase by 10%, there would be more than 2.8 million jobs, more than 1 million active women and there would be 280,000 new companies,” she said.

According to Báñez, another of the factors that hinder good business development is “the fact that young people join the labour market later than they’d like. This is bad news. They are our future, but they must be our present. Now in Spain, we do not have all the capital we need to meet the normal retirement replacement and that is a handicap for companies”.

In this sense, she called for a dual vocational training, with companies as allies, as a way of covering the workforce demand in certain sectors. And in terms of training, she advocated for it to be constant in the digitalization age. “We have to be permanently employable because the speed of change is so great. Digitalization is not going to kill jobs; it is going to transform them. Most people are going to re-train and we have to be multi-skilled, know how to do more than one thing. Competitiveness is at stake”.

Likewise, she has also encouraged “teamwork, creativity and decision making” in the business environment. “These skills can be learned, but more importantly, they can be thoroughly trained”, she said.