Imminent agreement on labor reform: unions and Ceoe meet their leaders

The employers and the unions, members of the social dialogue table on labor reform, have convened their executive bodies for this Thursday before the imminent agreement on the reform, which is not ruled out that it will be reached in the next few hours. CCOO has summoned its Executive Committee at 10.30 am. For its part, the Spanish Confederation of Business Organizations (Ceoe) has also summoned its executive “first thing in the morning.”

On Wednesday, the table in charge of seeking an agreement to reform the current judicial framework of labor relations met again in a marathon final stretch of the negotiations. They work against the clock, as the Second Vice President and Minister of Labor, Yolanda Díaz, remains committed to fulfilling the commitment to approve it before the end of the year that she acquired before Brussels – although the European Commission does not require it – and the rest of the Government cabinet. That would mean having a text to be submitted to the Council of Ministers on Tuesday 28, although there is always an extraordinary one on December 31.

Sources of the negotiation point to good harmony, although Antonio Garamendi, president of the CEOE, has reiterated that he will not say yes to a text that does not convince him, no matter how much pressure is applied to the table in recent days.

And it is that this Tuesday there were still four articles of the Workers’ Statute to be negotiated, plus several provisions as well as two other laws also of a labor nature. The rest remains at the behest of editorial tweaks.

But they are four articles of great substance. Among them the 15 relative to temporality. However, sources of the negotiation point to this newspaper that the article was practically closed since last weekend.

Not so Article 16 that regulates the fixed-discontinuous contract that the Government intends to promote as an alternative to temporary status. This contract has acquired great relevance, since it is intended a generalized use by the temporary agencies so that the workers assigned to third-party companies are hired as permanent discontinuous.

This claim has opened – in the middle of the negotiation of the labor reform – the opening of a new negotiation to address broader changes to the Temporary Work Companies law (14/1994) as has been requested from Asempleo, the employer’s association of these companies and that the Government itself confirmed in a document dated December 13 to which it had access the Economist.

The issue has substance, since the temporary employment agencies could assume permanent-discontinuous contracts if some things are modified, such as which agreement is to be applied to the assigned workers -the sector of the client company or one of their own for the temporary agencies, since they cannot be changing the conditions of their employees-, unemployment, the training of these employees and something especially conflictive: the priority of the call of these workers and the dismissal in case of resignation.

Subcontractors and agreements

Article 42, that of subcontracts of works and services, is also pending. This sector is in the government’s crosshairs as it understands that they are making abusive use of the work and service contract that will disappear with the labor reform. The Ministry of Labor accuses the subcontractors of lowering wages and other working conditions, because unlike the ETT, they should not submit the workers (who are not transferred, but made available to carry out a specific and not generalist work) to the same salary and working conditions as the temporary employment agencies with the employees who resign.

Hence, the big fight in this article is precisely which collective agreement will protect the workers of the subcontractors and, therefore, the minimum wage levels that they should receive.

Accordingly, the negotiation of article 84 (concurrence of agreements) also remains for the latter, which intends for the company agreement to lose prevalence over the sectoral agreement in terms of wages and hours. A principle linked to the subcontractors that have used this type of company agreement to establish lower wages than the sectorial ones to be competitive.

The aforementioned temporary agency law and law 32/2006 regulating subcontractors in the construction sector are also pending revision.