This time, the employers of Araba, Bizkaia and Gipuzkoa have transferred migration policy to their area: companies consider it essential to maintain their prosperity and benefits in the face of population evolution, but it has a fundamental “labor immigration” and has called for measures to promote it. In his opinion, it would be one of the two legs to face the “demographic challenge”. The other is the promotion of birth.

At the forum on demography and business held in Bilbao on Tuesday, the business association has made its views known on the subject through the data and the consequent coverage. Data provided include that in Araba, Bizkaia and Gipuzkoa 25% of workers will retire in ten years and 70% in thirty years: “In these years, 400,000 people will have to be incorporated into the labour market, if we want to maintain the level of prosperity of the Basque Country.”

The Director of Confesbask, Eduardo Arechaga, explained in the forum that if the current birth rate is maintained, in 2050 240,000 jobs would be lost in these three territories: “Despite the return of 98,000 workers of Basque origin living outside, we would not solve the problem,” he concludes.

The solution, for Confesbask, is to foster “immigration at work” and search for “talent” abroad. “In Senegal and in other countries of origin we should create school training workshops,” said the president of the Alavesa employers’ SEA, Pascal Gómez, at one point in the forum, according to El Diario.

According to Isabel Busto, president of Confesbask, “something similar to the Basque talent strategy”, designed by the institutional, business, university and educational system, without forgetting “to help the needy”.

According to Ikuspegi, the Basque Observatory on Immigration, however, the level of consumption of foreign people exceeds the aisa in the number of public aid they receive, with an economic boost, as the Ongi Etorri Refugees platform pointed out in this article of Berria.

The employers have asked that on Tuesday the exclusive competence of migration policy rests with the Basque Government and that a “one-stop shop” be created to facilitate the bureaucratic procedures for those who decide to “come”: “Something similar to “talent welcome”, says Busto in his speech.

Employers have not explained how this system would be combined with the right of migrants to live in dignity in the host village like any other, nor have they talked a lot about the working conditions that the thousands of workers they have asked for over the coming years would have.

Judgment in Bilbao

It is precisely in the same city and on the same day that Confesbake had a trial for refusing to set up the negotiating table for the Araba, Bizkaia and Gipuzkoa household employees’ agreement. LAB appealed to the courts.

“As a society, we cannot accept that care is performed under current conditions, absolutely necessary and indispensable for the maintenance of life. We cannot accept this labor exploitation,” explains Garbiñe Aranburu, general secretary of LAB, at a concentration in the judicial portal.