The Catalan Government will restore public employee's full salary in 2015 after a 3-year reduction

Barcelona (ACN).- In 2015 the employees of the Catalan Government and related institutions and public companies will receive their full salary once again after having suffered a 7.5% reduction over the last 3 years. The Spokesperson for the Catalan Government and Minister for the Presidency, Francesc Homs, announced the measure on Tuesday, after the weekly Cabinet meeting. Furthermore, the Executive will also stop the 15% reduction of working hours and salary of temporary workers in the public sector. Those austerity measures were approved in the 2012 budget as a drastic way to cut public spending in order to reduce the public deficit. The Spanish Government has been unilaterally imposing strict deficit targets on the Catalan Executive while it maintained an unfair inter-territorial fiscal scheme with Catalonia and reduced its resources. In fact, the Spanish Government and most of the other Autonomous Communities did not reduce public salaries in the worst years of economic crisis, while the Catalan Government was the first one to launch the ambitious austerity plan. Opposition parties have welcomed the decision to restore the full salaries of public employees next year, but they have asked the Catalan Executive to specify from where they will take the money to pay for such a measure. The Catalan Government does not plan on extending the current budget and they are planning to approve the 2015 accounts in the autumn of 2014. In order to do this, the governing centre-right pro-Catalan State coalition CiU would need the parliamentary support of its ally, the left-wing Catalan independence party ERC, which already backed the 2014 budget. The ERC's support will totally depend on whether the CiU will fully back the self-determination vote scheduled on the 9^th of November.

Now that the economy is recovering and public revenue is expected to grow, the President of the Catalan Government, Artur Mas, together with the Catalan Vice-President, Joana Ortega, has instructed the Finance Minister, Andreu Mas-Colell, to restore the full salary of public employees, as it was explained on Tuesday by Francesc Homs. However, Homs warned that the Spanish Government is not transferring enough funds to Catalonia in relation to the areas the Autonomous Executive has to manage. This was actually one of the main points that the Catalan President told the Spanish Prime Minister, Mariano Rajoy, in their July meeting. In fact, Homs recognised that "the revenue is an open issue for 2015". Despite this fact, Homs confirmed that the full salary restitution will be approved, since they are convinced that "we can honour this commitment".