Employment counselors in Andalucía, who are crucial to the Andalucía Orienta program—one of the Junta de Andalucía's main active employment policies—are speaking out against their precarious working conditions. These professionals, who guide unemployed individuals in job searches and design integration pathways, are facing stagnant salaries for a decade, making it difficult for them to sustain their own lives.

The mobilization, spearheaded by Esteban Robles, a counselor with nearly two decades of experience in Granada, has garnered significant support, with over a thousand signatures collected and engagement with parliamentary groups like Adelante Andalucía. The protest focuses on the program's funding model, which employs 722 professionals across the autonomous community and serves over 150,000 people annually.

The core issue is that the maximum subsidizable cost per counselor has barely changed in the last twenty years, remaining frozen since 2014 at just over 32,000 euros annually. Despite a 20% salary increase since 2004, accumulated inflation over the last decade, around 25-30%, has led to a loss of purchasing power of between 8,000 and 10,000 euros per technician annually. This situation results in high staff turnover and difficulties in maintaining stable teams, directly impacting the quality of service provided to vulnerable individuals.

The Ministry of Employment, for its part, attributes the lack of room for increased funding to the freezing of state funds from the sectoral conference over the past four years. However, professionals refute this argument, pointing out that the freeze has lasted over a decade and that other autonomous communities have successfully implemented salary update mechanisms under the same state framework. The Junta has expressed willingness to dialogue but claims not to know the instigators of this new movement, which has organized outside traditional union structures.