The non-police personnel of the General Directorate of the Police will hold strikes for two months which, if not canceled, will affect thousands of citizens. The majority union among civil servants of the Interior, CCOO, has called these strikes in response to the “trampling on the rights of non-police personnel” that they attribute to the leadership of the ministry and the DGP. Unless they are called off at the last minute, on Friday, March 5, the strikes will begin in many of the 1,500 DNI and passport renewal positions that exist in the national territory, in addition to the Immigration offices.
The union intends to extend these strikes on Fridays for at least two months. If no agreement has been reached on April 30, the union announces that full days of a strike will be called. The strikes have been called precisely on the day that there is more influx for document renewals. Both the DNAs, the passports, and the cards of foreigners could suffer massive cancellations that, in the latter case of foreigners, already have a waiting list of months to get an appointment. For the rest of the citizens who have to renew their documentation, it can also be a great inconvenience, with a long delay in getting a new appointment.
Or, in the best of cases, with an appointment not so far in time but in the distance, because the office you have chosen may be full and you have to travel to another much more distant one for the procedure. This CCOO strike will have another impact that is not so visible to the public, but that could have consequences on police operations. The personnel liable to make the strikes are also in charge of making the diets of the police officers posted to missions in different places. The problem is that without the allowances, the police officers cannot travel, so it could happen that they would have to delay or cancel deployments of agents for different tasks.
Fernando Garcia, general secretary of Workers’ Commissions in the Ministry of the Interior, assured this newspaper that CCOO “has been denouncing for years that Interior does not cover all the vacancies of non-police personnel, and this causes police officers to be placed in those positions. , to the detriment of the public service, which loses agents in the street “. This situation, explains Garcia, “makes many police officers frustrated because they are placed in an office as soon as they leave the academy, but it also causes a serious extra cost because the police earn 600 euros more per month than the administrative assistant who is doing that. same job.
According to CCOO estimates, about 3,000 DGP agents are carrying out documentation tasks, etc., in the same offices where non-police personnel work. Calculating an average of 600 euros more salary than the assistants, for 14 pays, they leave 25 million euros. “That is the extra cost of not filling the vacant positions with non-police personnel,” Garcia denounces.
This is the latest chapter in CCOO’s bad relationship with the Ministry of the Interior and the General Directorate of Police. Already during the confinement, dozens of complaints were filed with the Labor Inspection for breaching the protection protocols against Covid-19, since it did not communicate positive cases in its public offices. On this occasion, the union complains that a fluid dialogue is lacking with the ministerial leadership and On this occasion, the union complains that a fluid dialogue is lacking with the ministerial leadership and that of the DGP.
