A new employers' association for SMEs hovers in the air

BarcelonaDo not rule it out. After the general elections on November 29, a new state-wide business association could be born. Once the link with Conpymes was broken by the Catalan Pimec, which was a founder, and a group of 18 other organizations, this state entity is beginning to be glimpsed to defend small and medium-sized enterprises. Those who have unsubscribed consider that Conpymes is now left as "a group of friends with little representativeness", while from the organization chaired by José María Torres they ensure that the entities that have left already had an expulsion file open and state that they maintain some 60 organizations as members.

The intention of Pimec and the rest is to "find the appropriate vehicle" to maintain the strategy of presence of SMEs in all bodies and forums where issues and matters that may affect them are discussed, according to the sources consulted. The Catalan organization chaired by Antoni Cañete has been achieving, step by step, objectives that it had set for itself in this matter. The most recent, the representation in the Economic and Social Council (CES) in its name and that of the Balearic business association Pimeb with its ambassador in Madrid, Ferran Bel, as representative. The third vice president and Minister of Labor, Yolanda Díaz, has opted to leave tied up before the elections of November 29 one of the commitments that she had not fulfilled and that had cooled her relations with the Catalan SME association. All with the total opposition of the CEOE and its subsidiary Cepyme, the only business associations present so far in the CES.

Torres, who was expelled from Pimec and who defends that Conpymes should be the entity integrating the CES, ensures that, once the elections are over, he will return to fight to seat his organization in this consultative body of the Spanish government in socioeconomic and labor matters. And, on the other hand, also Pimec, already as a member of the CES, and the rest of the organizations that accompany it will wait to see what the result of the elections is. The course of the socio-labor legal framework will depend a lot on what emerges from the polls. Then it will be seen how to constitute a new business association or SME organization at a state level as a counterweight to the CEOE. It is the objective that Pimec has always had and that it has now seen frustrated through Conpymes.