Inditex offered its 2026 shareholders ten pillars for growth: expansion, customer experience, the latest technologies, design, emotion, innovation, efficiency, talent, a commitment to Spain, and community. It reads well. The shop floor is not on the list, and the shop floor noticed.

Marta Ortega had already given the meeting its finest line. Artificial intelligence would transform the industry, she said, yet “the real value lies in people” — creativity, sensitivity, judgement and empathy, “qualities that cannot yet be fully measured.” It was an elegant defence of the human against the machine. Within the hour, the meeting would put a price on them.

The technology she set beneath people is still the plan. Óscar García Maceiras promised “more technological stores” and online platforms with search that reads voice and image. The pitch is confident, and it is not wrong; better search converts more browsers into buyers, and better stores photograph well for shareholders. The integrated store is the growth story Inditex tells best. Each telling names what the customer will touch and leaves out who is standing there when she does.

An integrated store does not run itself. Voice and image search still pass the customer to a person for the fitting room, the return, the order gone wrong. Ten pillars hold up the plan on paper; the one holding it up on the floor is the assistant, and she did not make the list.

Then a shop assistant asked for the microphone. Lucía Domínguez Rodríguez, a CIG delegate who chairs the Stradivarius works council in A Coruña, spoke for Galicia’s store staff against the new national agreement for textile chains. Under it, she said, current assistants in A Coruña province stand to lose as much as 2,000 euros a year. Maceiras answered on the floor: store conditions, he said, are “far superior to any collective agreement,” and the company’s existing agreements “remain fully in force.” He did not offer the written guarantee she had asked for.

Talent was the eighth pillar; wages were the intervention.

Outside, pickets wanted the bargaining done in Galicia, not Madrid. A CIG communiqué put new hires’ pay at 4,500 euros less than current staff — a figure Domínguez did not raise from the floor.

On the same afternoon, in the same hall, shareholders approved a rise in the chair’s own pay, to 1.05 million euros from 2027; the same vote lifted chief executive Óscar García Maceiras’s fixed pay 18 percent, to 2.95 million. The new terms run through 2029, the same window in which the floor’s own raise is meant to land. Inditex frames that raise the same way: 12.5 percent across three years. Domínguez put the real annual rise for A Coruña and Pontevedra at 1.65 percent, not 4.

Ortega told the room the real value is in people, and she was not being sentimental. That is not a defence of the shop assistant — it is the reason the company is fighting over her wage. No firm bargains this hard over what it thinks is worthless.