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

BarcelonaConsummated break. Pimec and 18 other organizations have decided to withdraw from the state employers' 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 employers' association and the others that have chosen to leave, and which claim to represent 80% of Conpymes' representation, denounce “a prolonged process of irregular management that the entities consider unilateral, undemocratic, and removed from the collective project that motivated their participation”.

They add that this situation “has been aggravated by the repeated failure to comply 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 the current situation to be “incompatible with a plural, participatory business representation at the service of small and medium-sized enterprises”.

They also highlight that the joint exit “does not respond to a specific disagreement, but to a process sustained over time that has eroded the trust and the conditions necessary 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 dates back more than a year. At that time, the president of the organization, José María Torres, decided to lead a trade mission to Israel amidst the tension between the Spanish executive and that country. Later, there were also discrepancies in the renewal of the board of directors.