The content is the result of consensus between employers and centrals, which has left a rule that pursues balance, although it benefits workers more than companies
The Congress of Deputies will vote this Thursday whether or not to validate the royal decree that structures the labour reform agreed between the Government, employers and unions. The package of regulations already published in the Official State Gazette (BOE) and in force includes a battery of measures that change part of the rules of the labor market game. And some of them repeal part of the labor reform inherited from the stage of Mariano Rajoy. The content is the result of consensus between employers and centrals, which has left a rule that pursues balance between the parties. Some clearly benefit workers and others are more designed for business interests, although in the final balance of the reform the former add up to more than the latter. And it is that the main asset of the employers to join the agreement was to minimize the damage that a more biased reform could have caused them and that touched several pillars of the Rajoy rule that it does not touch. Reform, the latter, which clearly benefited businessmen.
The parties and unions that defend the law argue that none of the approved measures detracts from workers’ rights, while critics dismiss it as insufficient and criticize the fact that several of Rajoy’s legacies that harm employees and benefit companies companies – such as compensationthe processing wages or the administrative authorization of the are– are still in force in the current system. In this article we review the content of what was approved and who benefits most from it.
Temporality: veto the work and service contract
The core of the coalition government reform is intended to limit the temporality in Spain, the highest in Europe. Here the ones who have the most to gain are the workers, especially young people and people without university studies or vocational training. And who has the most to lose are the Business with an intensive use of temporality, especially located in the farmingthe manufacturing industrythe construction and the restoration.
The most substantial novelty of the reform is the elimination of the contract for work and service, which during 2021 represented one of every three contracts signed. And said elimination will mainly benefit those workers with basic studies. Well, 85% of the people who signed a construction and service contract last year did not have a vocational training or university degree.
The sector most affected by the elimination of this contract is agriculture, to the point that one in four work and service contracts were signed by agricultural laborers. Other guilds that will have to redirect their hiring – it will be necessary to see if towards the indefinite one – will be the manufacturing industry, the restoration, the construction, the legal services and the professionals of the culture and spectacles.
By age, the youths They are the layers that concentrate the most temporality, that sign the most contracts for work and whose contracts are of shorter duration. The main avenues of attack of the reform to temporality.
Ertes: employers save compensation
The labor reform consolidates part of the model of are you that the Government has enabled in an extraordinary way during this pandemic. Here, although both workers and companies win, the public aid enabled for this mechanism has been one of the incentives that has ended up attracting the patronal to yes Well, by encouraging the Government an alternative mechanism to the dismissalcompanies save substantial expense on compensation.
Both in the new ERTEs of the RED Mechanism, and in the existing ones (for economic, organizational or production reasons) or in those of force majeure, the company will be able to access different levels of bonuses in the Social Security contributions of the workers. . To do this, you will have to meet a condition: maintenance of employment during the six months after the end of the erte. In addition, in the classic ertes and in the sectoral ones of the RED Mechanism, employers can only benefit from a 20% discount on social contributions if they provide training to workers.
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Collective bargaining: unions recover positions
The reform designed by the second vice president, Yolanda Diaz, repeals only part of the PP norm and its normative value focuses on introducing new ones. However, there are two elements of Rajoy’s legacy that he does touch directly and that affect the Collective negotiation. The first of them is the ultraactivity and here the reform directly benefits the unions and those who lose are the employers.
Since the entry into force of the reform, the agreements that expire will not decay. Usually an agreement is negotiated for a term of three years and once it expires, the parties must negotiate a new one. If there is no agreement, before the reform the agreement expired and the company could withdraw a large part of the conditions in force until then. Now this changes and while a new agreement is not negotiated, the salary and the other components of the previous agreement remain in force until the new agreement.
Another point that is repealed from the reform of the PP and in which the unions gain positions to the detriment of the employers is in the prevalence of the sectoral agreement about the company. Before the previous reform, a company could create an agreement with worse conditions than the sectoral one, which served them to compete downwards. Here the companies that value quality labor relations have also come out on top, because they get rid of ‘low cost’ competitors. Now a company agreement can only be signed if it is to improve the sector.
Subcontracting: limit to compete with lower wages
The agreed labor reform aims to make the Outsourcing a way for companies to specialize, not to save wages. Here the workers have won, especially profiles such as maids, security guards or carriers, among others. And they have lost the related companies to save costs at the expense of the salaries of the subcontractors.
The new norm specifies that “the applicable collective agreement for contractor and subcontractor companies will be that of the sector of the activity carried out in the contract or subcontractor.” In other words, if Seat hires a company to do the cleaning, those workers will be paid according to the cleaning agreement. The unions would have liked to win more rights and -following the example- that the application agreement for a subcontracted by Seat was that of Seat.