The Ministry of Labor states that the trainee students can continue to resort to the figure of the extracurricular, those that are not necessary to pass the degree and one of the niches where the highest proportion of fraud has been detected. Although he advocates temporarily limiting its use, as stated in the latest draft discussed this Tuesday with employers and unions, and to which EL PERIÓDICO has had access. The proposal is that students can do a maximum of 480 hours of internships in a year, whether curricular or extracurricular, which is equivalent to 40 hours a week during a quarter or 20 hours a week during a semester. They may not exceed the 15% of the time that last the total of subjects.
The meeting this Tuesday to try to unravel the new Scholarship Statute It has ended, after three hours of talks, without agreement. The latest draft does not satisfy either the unions or the employers’ association and one of the main axes of the negotiation will be to clearly define that figure of 480 hours. The new text, which will be subject to change, will be discussed on Wednesday of next week.
The centrals ask for less extracurricular practices and the employers demand more. Although the former aim to directly suppress the figure of extracurricular internships, understanding that it feeds employment by the corporations of fake interns and that these people should be with a labor contract, they are open to move after months of give and take to facilitate an agreement in which the employer is.
The elimination of the practices that are carried out outside the mandatory training plan was already a commitment that the centrals considered closed with Labor and on which they reached a preliminary agreement. However, and in order to try to attract the employers and various parliamentary groups, the department led by the second vice president, Yolanda Diaz, recovered the figure of extracurricular practices in its latest drafts. And it is that the lack of consensus in Congress to validate the norm has weighed on the negotiating process. The employers are not entirely satisfied either, but sources familiar with the conversations are moderately optimistic that they may end up endorsing the rule if they manage to increase the hours that extracurricular practices can legally cover.
Without an agreement between the parties, Labor has once again summoned the social agents to a new meeting next Tuesday March 14. “There has been progress, but to be able to sign this regulation we have to be sure that it will serve to eliminate fraud and that no scholarship holder is doing work for free and without paying contributions”, has valued the CCOO youth manager, Adria Junyent. “We are not so interested in what the internships are called, but rather what the internships define. It is very important to clearly define what a training internship is and what an employment contract is. And until we have a clear delimitation that prevents fraud, we are not going to finish “, has declared the general deputy secretary of trade union policy of UGT, Fernando Lujan. CEOE sources have been concise in their assessments: “We are going to continue working discreetly and we will meet again with a new text.”
Lower student-tutor ratios
Another novelty introduced by the latest draft on which Labor and the social agents have discussed this Tuesday afternoon is the limitation of the maximum number of scholarship holders per tutor. In theory, there can only be a maximum of five students per worker in charge and scholarship holders may not exceed the 20% of the staff the entire workplace. Although each company may agree with the university or training centers to extend or lower these limits. This means a reduction compared to the restrictions of the first drafts, which did not contemplate this power and which can cause the ratios of scholarship holders per tutor to skyrocket, to the detriment of the former’s learning.
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Work maintains extracurricular practices but tries to prevent them from continuing to reach levels of fraud. To this end, the latest draft contemplates that the Ministry of Universities carry out, within two years from the entry into force of the reform, an evaluation “to determine the degree of linkage of extracurricular practices to their training purpose”. In other words, it allows detecting which internships have served students to learn and really train with a view to later jumping into a job -in the company where they did their internship or in another- and in which interns have ended up working solely as labor cheap.
The last approach of Labor maintains the obligation of companies to pay basic expenses of the students, such as the transport wave maintenance and the accommodation, if they do the internship outside their city of habitual residence. All internship agreements that are currently in force must be renewed and adapted to the new regulations before the December 31, 2023.