The second vice president and Minister of Labor, Yolanda Diazpresented this Monday at the Congress of Deputies which will be the Government’s legislative agenda on labor matters during this new legislature that is beginning. The reduction of the working day to 37.5 hours per week, the causes and compensation amounts for dismissal, the reform of part-time work or the access of workers to the boards of directors of large companies are the main matters that Díaz seeks address over the next four years.
If the previous legislature was that of the labor reform, the teleworking law, the new employment law or the ‘Rider’ law, among others; This new one will also be full of changes that are destined to be significant in the daily lives of workers and companies. Their culmination and scope will depend on social dialogue and the peculiar parliamentary arithmetic that the coalition manages to put together in each case.
The first element that Work with the social agents will address will be the reduction of the maximum working day per week, for which the parties have an appointment this Thursday at nine-thirty in the morning. This was one of the most publicized commitments by the leader of Sumar during the electoral campaign and “even voters on the right and the extreme right agree,” she claimed.
The objective is clear, with the reduction from the current 40 hours to 38.5 hours in 2024 and a horizon of reaching 37.5 hours by the end of the legislature. Now Labor will seek to specify how, since the work organization of companies is diverse and many times the hourly component is distributed annually. “I would like to reach an agreement, […] but if it cannot be tripartite, it will be bipartite,” Díaz has alerted the employers.
Dismissal reform
The Minister of Labor has one eye on Europe to see whether or not its future rulings reprimand the Kingdom of Spain. And contrary to the opinion of the Ministry of Justice, she hopes so. In May 2022, UGT denounced the conditions of dismissal of the current Spanish legal system before the European Committee of Social Rights (CES) as it considers that they do not sufficiently protect employees. And Díaz intends to rely on a hypothetical favorable statement from Europe to that complaint to support his reform.
Díaz already advanced before the elections that he intended to regulate the conditions of contractual terminations so that “not be profitable” for the companies, as he defended this Monday in parliament. Labor intends that the compensation guarantee “adequate reparation” and be “truly dissuasive” for the companies.
Criteria contemplated in the European social charter and that have already been invoked by various Spanish courts to improve the minimum compensation established by law. The reform will also address the legal grounds on which companies can resort to dismissal. However, in the short term the change that the Government will introduce regarding dismissal will be to eliminate sudden incapacity as a legal cause.
Partiality, interns and boards of directors
The range of priorities for this Labor legislature is completed by a reform of the conditions of part-time work. Modality in which 2.6 million people operate in Spain (73% of them women). “Part of the precariousness that remains in our country is in partiality. […] This is the key that we must change, especially because it has a gender bias,” Díaz declared.
The first modification in this regard will be included in the transposition of the European directive for some transparent working conditions, as EL PERIÓDICO has advanced. It will oblige, among other things, companies to give three days’ notice if they want a part-time employee to work additional hours. In terms of conciliation, although for all employees, the Government plans to extend birth leave by four weeks and parental leave by another four weeks.
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As an umbrella for all these reforms, the Ministry of Labor transfers to this legislature a matter that was left pending in the last one: the reform of the Workers’ Statute, to turn it into the “new Labor statute of the 21st century.” Here one of the most notable reforms is the increase in the participation of worker representatives in the management bodies of large companies, emulating the German model. “The lack of constitutional compliance on this matter is striking,” he highlighted.
Another pending issue from the last legislature is the parliamentary processing of the Scholarship Statute. A rule agreed upon and signed publicly with the unions to, among others, oblige all companies or entities to pay for transportation and materials for their intern students. On this issue, the lack of support from regular allies of the coalition but with management responsibilities in the autonomous communities, such as ERC or the PNV, hindered its success. Since universities are opposed to this issue, since they are one of the main employers of scholarship holders in the country.