New year, new opportunity … ?

We don’t need the New Year to make good resolutions, we’re working every day to make our society fairer. And 2023 had barely begun when we already knew what we’d have to defend this year, among other things… the index.

No sooner had the year begun, and no sooner had they emerged from their New Year’s drunkenness, than they got down to business. Attacks came from all sides against our index system, defended so hard until recently and so important in these times. It would be socially unfair to adjust our wages to rising prices. Companies would not have the means to maintain the value of our work. The index would have to be capped, etc. Representatives of employers and leading politicians… all felt they had to attack our index once again. It’s all about preparing the ground for 2023 and inflation, which is still high. When our National Institute of Statistics then announced that a tranche would be triggered as early as February, they complained that enough was enough, because they would already have to pay a new tranche in April – which, however, they had caused themselves by deferring it last year and up to then having it financed by the collectivity. For employers, this represents a saving of 8 months during which they did not have to pay the index.

It’s worth pointing out here that if the February indexation instalment is paid, the credit goes entirely to the OGBL’s commitment. Thanks to our tireless union effort and mobilization, the OGBL succeeded in fully restoring our indexation mechanism in September 2022. If the March 2022 agreement, signed by all except OGBL, were still in force, the February tranche would have been postponed by 14 months, to 2024. Without OGBL, there would be no tranche. We haven’t forgotten that. And we won’t forget it. This year too.

January had not yet ended, and one political announcement followed another. The Minister of Finance lifted a veil on the long-announced tax reductions for households.

At the latest since the State of the Nation address, we know that for our Prime Minister, there are “no taboos” when it comes to taxation, and that “something will still happen if there is the necessary room for maneuver”. At a time when, since the first tripartite meeting, the OGBL has been calling for the tax scale to be brought into line with inflation. Our government’s make-up of its own tax policy is phenomenal.

“The 2017 tax reform has led to greater tax justice”, the government claims – in reality, it was only then a correction of older errors, the unfair distribution of the tax burden has grown even more considerably since then.

We don’t need
false promises,
but strong action.

“This government is not raising taxes” – an indecent statement given that it has already carried out 6 real increases in individual taxes. The “cold progression” continues relentlessly to increase our net losses with each indexation tranche. Meanwhile, corporate taxes have already been cut twice by this government.

And now we’re told that “there will be tax reductions down to the middle class again this year” – in reality, these “reductions” have already been pre-funded for years by households and are now to be returned to them, in part only, as an election gift in the form of tax credits.

This is not enough for the OGBL. The cold progression and its permanent tax increases must now come to an end. The OGBL will continue to oppose the stealing of the net index value with the same force as it does for the gross index value.

It is unacceptable that politics has already been reduced to mere election promises. You’ve been elected for five years. And campaigning is not a mandate you have received from the electorate; you have to carry out a concrete policy until the very end of the mandate. A case in point is labor law, where apart from the big announcements in the coalition program, not much has happened since. There is still time to undertake the necessary reforms before the elections.

We don’t need false promises, we need strong action. As the OGBL is doing.

Nora Back, OGBL president