Second vice president and Minister of Labor Yolanda Díaz this Monday Congress of Deputies This will be the Government’s legislative agenda on labor matters in the new legislative session that is starting. Reducing the working day to 37.5 hours per week, reasons for dismissals and compensation amounts, part-time work reform or workers’ access to the boards of directors of large companies are the main issues that Díaz plans to address in the coming period. next four years.
If the previous legislature was labor reform, teleworking law, new labor law or ‘Rider’ law, among others; This new era will also be full of significant changes in the daily lives of employees and companies. Their final outcome and scope will depend on the social dialogue and the specific parliamentary arithmetic that the coalition manages to put together in each case.
The first element that will be addressed in working with social actors will be the reduction of the maximum weekly working day, for which the parties will have an appointment at half past nine in the morning this Thursday. He claimed that this was one of the Sumar leader’s most publicized commitments during the election campaign and that “even voters on the right and far right agreed”.
The target is clear, with the prediction of reducing the current 40 hours to 38.5 hours in 2024 and reaching 37.5 hours at the end of the legislative period. Labor will now seek to determine how companies’ work organization should be diverse and how the hourly component is distributed annually. “I want to reach an agreement […] but if it cannot be tripartite, it will be bilateral,” Díaz warned employers.
dismissal reform
The Minister of Labor has an eye on Europe to see if future decisions will condemn the Kingdom of Spain. He hopes that’s the case, contrary to the Justice Department’s view. In May 2022, the UGT condemned the terms of dismissal before the European Committee of Social Rights (CES), as it considered that the current Spanish legal system did not adequately protect employees. And Díaz plans to rely on Europe’s hypothetical positive explanation of this complaint to support his reform.
Díaz had already suggested that he intended to regulate the terms of termination of the contract before the elections, so that “not profitableLabor aims for the compensation to guarantee “adequate compensation” and be a “genuine deterrent” for companies, as it argued in parliament on Monday.
Criteria foreseen in the European social contract and already used by various Spanish courts in order 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 make regarding dismissals will be to eliminate the legal reason for sudden incapacity.
Bias, interns and boards
The priorities of this Labor legislature were complemented by reform of part-time working conditions. The method used by 2.6 million people in Spain (73% of whom are women). “Some of the ongoing insecurity in our country stems from partiality. […] This is the key that we need to change, especially because there is gender discrimination,” Díaz said.
The first change in this context will be included in the transposition of the European directive for some countries. transparent working conditionsAs developed by El Periódico de Cataluña of the Prensa Ibérica group. Among other things, companies will be required to give three days’ notice if they want a part-time employee to work additional hours.
As an umbrella of all these reforms, the Ministry of Labor is transferring to this legislature an issue that has been pending since the last law: the reform of the Labor Code and turning it into the “new Labor Code of the 21st century”. One of the most notable reforms here is to increase the participation of workers’ representatives in the management bodies of large companies, taking the German model as an example. “The lack of constitutional coherence on this issue is striking,” he emphasized.