Pimec breaks with Conpymes, the Spanish employers' association it helped to found

BarcelonaConsummate break. Pimec and 18 other organizations have decided to withdraw from the state employer association Conpymes. With this decision, the Catalan business organization presided over by Antoni Cañete culminates a long period of discrepancies with the entity it helped found in 2021 to act as a counterweight to the CEOE. The Catalan SME association and the others that have chosen to leave and who claim to represent 80% of Conpymes' representation denounce “a prolonged process of irregular management that the entities consider unilateral, undemocratic, and distant from the collective project that motivated their participation”.

They add that this situation “has been aggravated by the repeated non-compliance with the statutes and internal regulations, and also by the violation of the fundamental rights of the members, including the right to vote”. The associations denounce “the instrumentalization of Conpymes” and consider that the current situation is “incompatible with a plural, participatory business representation at the service of small and medium-sized enterprises”.

They also highlight that the joint departure “does not respond to a specific discrepancy, but to a process sustained over time that has eroded the trust and the necessary conditions to continue being part of a shared project”.

This decision coincides with the entry of Pimec and the Balearic Pimeb into the Economic and Social Council (CES), a long-standing demand that the current Vice President and Minister of Labor, Yolanda Díaz, has decided to approve before leaving the Spanish government. Conpymes, like CEOE-Foment, opposes this decision and advocated for entering this state consultative body as a representative of SMEs.

The deterioration of the relationship between Pimec and Conpymes has been going on for more than a year. At that time, the organization's president, José María Torres, decided to lead a trade mission to Israel in the midst of the Spanish executive's tension with that country. Later, there were also discrepancies in the renewal of the board of directors.

Torres, for his part, in statements to ARA, asserts that both Pimec and the rest of the organizations that have announced their withdrawal already had an expulsion file opened "because they had stopped paying their fees". He also states that Pimec intended to control Conpymes and assures that, once the elections are over, his organization will again demand to join the CES, just as some judicial rulings, he claims, recognize.