ACCIONA strengthens its commitment to Equal Opportunities

ACCIONA and Spain’s leading labor unions -UGT and CC.OO.- sign a specific Equal Opportunities Plan for the Company’s Infrastructure and Real Estate divisions.

The president of ACCIONA Infrastructure, Pedro Martínez; the managing Director of ACCIONA Real Estate, Isabel Antúnez; the Secretary General of the Construction Workers, Woodworkers and Related Activities branch of Spain’s Comisiones Obreras labor union, Fernando Serrano, and the Secretary General of the Metalworkers, Construction Workers and Related Activities branch of the Unión General de Trabajadores union, Manuel Fernández López "Lito", today signed an Equal Opportunities Plan tailored specifically for ACCIONA Infrastructure and ACCIONA Real Estate. The Plan, which comes into effect as soon as it is signed and will run until December 2014, has been created in accordance with Spain’s Effective Equal Opportunities Organic Law and comes in response to a text that is accepted today as the framework for the entire sector. After signing the agreement, some 65 per cent of ACCIONA’s workforce will be covered by the Company’s equal opportunities plans and the Company expects to cover the entire workforce in the coming weeks through sector-wide accords or company agreements.

• To promote the active application of the principle of equality between men and women, ensuring equal opportunities in terms of access, professional development and working conditions at all levels and in all areas of the organization.
• To ensure as far as possible a fairer and more balanced distribution of men and women across the workforce.
• To guarantee and improve working conditions for both men and women, taking steps to facilitate the conciliation of work and private life.

Furthermore, ACCIONA has established as a priority its commitment to sustainability and responsibility across its entire workforce to nurture a corporate culture focused on equal opportunities and the avoidance of any kind of harassment in the workplace or sexually-motivated discrimination.

The Plan includes an annex, "Protocol in the event of workplace and/or sexual discrimination", which is already in place in ACCIONA companies across the globe. Within the framework of the principles, values and ethical commitments laid down in ACCIONA’s Code of Conduct, the Company’s management team uses the Protocol to signal its intention to adopt, as part of its responsibilities, any number of measures required to foster a working environment free from all kinds of harassment, and to make clear that the Company will not tolerate behavior of this kind.

Pioneering initiatives

Diversity and equality are the main pillars for the growth and social progress that underpin the ACCIONA philosophy. When the Equal Opportunities Organic Law was introduced in Spain, ACCIONA adopted a range of measures aimed at ensuring its professionals a thorough knowledge of the fundamental aspects of the law. Accordingly, it set up a special e-learning training course in Equal Opportunities and Discrimination on the Company’s ‘Virtual Campus’ (part of the ACCIONA Corporate University). The course set out to teach staff how to cope with a range of everyday situations and how to ensure that all professional decisions fully comply with current equal opportunities law.

In addition, a special Leadership for Female Managers course was set up to encourage thought on the challenges, barriers and stereotypes that may affect the professional development of women in a management role.

Another important initiative was the company-wide awareness campaign, "Crecemos en la Igualdad" ("Let’s grow on an equal footing"). ACCIONA’s many and varied equal opportunities initiatives and measures make it a labor market front-runner and serve to strengthen the Company’s Corporate Responsibility strategy.