Social dialogue resumes its rights with the meeting today of the public sector commission. A meeting that will be chaired by the Minister in charge of Civil Service and Modernisation of the Administration, Abdelaâdim Guerrouj, and in which the 5 most representative unions that participate in the social dialogue talks will take part. Two points will be discussed, namely the working methodology and the examination of the agenda to define priorities.

This resumption in promised time of this round was preceded by a battle of wits between the Minister of Employment and the unions regarding the law regulating the right to strike, the initial draft of which had been prepared by the former government and put in drawers due to the outcry against it.

It is, moreover, under the sign of the refusal of this one that unions, with the exception of the UGTM, intend to lead their fight. A fight that seems all the more crucial to them as this project is part of a package including other texts, namely the law governing professional unions and the exceptional conditions allowing for the conclusion of fixed-term contracts.

All these texts drawn up unilaterally by the government do not seem to please the social partners, since both the FDT and the UMT, for example, have already taken a position on them. They have, for example, affirmed their pure and simple rejection of the strike bill. An initiative that is all the more easily explained as the government has only included in the Finance Act the implementation of the provisions to which its predecessor had committed.

Does the Benkirane government have anything new to offer the unions? Would the current economic situation allow it? Nothing is less certain. As proof, in its 2012 budget, the government only allocates 13.2 billion DH to the implementation of the commitments made under the social dialogue in 2012, knowing that many measures that appear in the agreement of April 26, 2011, are awaiting their implementation. Is this budget capable of satisfying the unionists and responding to their demands? Will the government manage to mitigate the social grumbling further fuelled particularly after its decision to proceed with deductions from the salaries and wages of all strikers, and particularly those of the public administration?