The recent labor reform, now in force for a year and a quarter since it began in March, has shifted the balance of power toward temporary employment agencies. The aim is to curb the casual or indiscriminate use of temporary contracts. Under the new rules, hiring firms cannot simply cut a worker loose when a project ends or when business activity slows. Instead, they must maintain a continuous contractual relationship with the worker, or reassign the worker to another company under a shared arrangement. The practice of severing ties only to rehire later through a third party is being scrutinized, and the system now makes it harder to break the direct link between employee and employer during periods of inactivity. Previously, the worker’s contract with the third party could endure only for the life of the external need, but the reform aims to secure more stability for workers who operate within a multi-party framework.
While Díaz has not disclosed every practical detail of the new inspection campaign, it is clear that monitoring the faithful application of perpetual or multi-stage contracts will be a priority. The goal is to ensure that these contractual arrangements are used correctly and not exploited to bypass labor protections. For the year 2023, proper management of this contract model is being treated as a priority by the so-called labor authorities who oversee workplace practices across the country.
According to data compiled in the organization’s most recent annual report, agencies and employment intermediaries had not previously been a principal target of the labor oversight body. In 2021, inspectors opened 415 investigations involving these intermediaries across the country and found irregularities in about a quarter of them. Sanctions proposals were issued in those cases, accompanied by financial penalties totaling just under four hundred thousand euros. This signals a shift in enforcement priorities and a firmer hand on how temporary staffing arrangements are validated and monitored.
Month after month, roughly 190,000 workers are presented by temporary staffing firms to third-party employers. Of these, about 32,000 are located in Catalonia, underscoring regional variations in how the intermediary model is used. Sectorally, the manufacturing sector accounts for around 28.2 percent of all such contracts, followed by agriculture, animal husbandry, and fisheries at 17.8 percent. Latest figures from the Ministry of Labour show that transportation contracts make up 17.5 percent and accommodation services 12.3 percent. These numbers reveal where temporary staffing is most prevalent and where the reform’s effects could be felt first among workers and employers alike, including in cross-border contexts where similar hiring models exist across North America.