The Supreme Court has overturned the appeal filed by the large CEOE employers against the regulations of equality approved during this legislature. The employers were against the fact that the unions with majority representation in a sector were designated as valid interlocutors to negotiate equality plans in those companies -mainly smaller ones- where there was no legal representation of the workers. The high court has issued a ruling, as made public this Friday, and has rejected CEOE’s appeal, ruling in favor and recognizing the negotiating role of the power plants.
Last July 2020, the Ministry of Labor agreed with the unions on the regulations on equality that should be deployed by the new regulations inherited from the first Government of Pedro Sánchez alone. It was the first social dialogue agreement from which the employers distanced themselves, later it would be followed by two increases in the minimum interprofessional salary and an agreement on pensions. And the main argument for this was the negotiating role that the regulations conferred on the unions.
The new labor regulations, which have been fully in force since this year and partially since the previous two, require companies to have an equality plan in order and registered with the Administration. And that equality plan must have been previously negotiated with the legal representation of the workers. What happens when there is no such legal representation? In large and medium-sized companies this is not usually a problem, since practically all of them have a constituted company committee and in some also union sections with their delegates.
small business problem
However, in smaller companies it is not uncommon for there to be no such committee or unions present, which means there is no interlocutor to negotiate the equality plan. The solution found by the Ministry of Labor to this problem was to give power to the most representative unions in the sector to appoint ‘ad hoc’ representatives to negotiate. And the companies were forced to go to the power plants and ask them to appoint someone to negotiate. Some with greater foresight and others at the last moment, generating a collapse in the union offices since they did not have enough released to be able to carry out these procedures.
That is why, in part, the implementation of equality plans is considerably behind schedule. According to current regulations, all companies with more than 50 employees on the workforce should have a list of these negotiated and registered with the Administration from March 7 of this year. However, according to the latest data available on that date, only 15.6% of the companies involved in the standard throughout Spain complied. A non-compliance that the Inspection can sanction with fines of between €7,501 and €225,018.