The group led by Ione Belarra presented its proposal two weeks ago to reform the Workers’ Statute. This is an extensive bill that seeks to set the working day at 35 hours a week, recover compensation of 45 days per year and opens the debate on the trial period, after the number of layoffs has grown significantly in The last few years without the Government or the unions being clear about what the alternative design could be. We can propose that companies have to justify this decision in writing so that the worker can claim it before the social jurisdiction, which could declare it null and void.
This is stated in the bill registered in the Congress of Deputies that La Información has consulted and to which the Government must respond in the coming days. The purple ones propose a modification of article 34 of the law, which regulates the period in which both the worker and the employer can terminate the contract without prior notice and without providing justification – unless otherwise agreed upon. This Work can reach six months for qualified technicians and is restricted to two for the rest of the workers, in accordance with directive 2019/1152 that the Ministry of Transplanted in February and the Podemos initiative maintains these times, but advocates that It is processed as a disciplinary dismissal at the judicial level.
The increase in these layoffs after the approval of the labor reform led some actors to suspect that old temporary contracts were being covered up with trial periods of indefinite labor agreements. The Labor Inspection monitors that companies do not engage in this practice, because it represents a fraud of law, but labor activists have warned of the difficulty of following these movements and demonstrating that it is a repeated practice, as well as the small number of cases that have been reported. reached the courts. For this reason, the Minister of Labor, Yolanda Díaz, announced a specific campaign to prosecute this practice on April 24.
The statements of the second vice president of the Government coincided with a new rise in layoffs during the trial period, according to Social Security statistics that go up to March 2024. That month there were 75,000 people who did not pass the trial period. test, but the statistics peaked – if we exclude the pandemic period – last summer with 105,200 people who found themselves in this situation in July. However, it is not among the issues that the Executive wants to address in the next dismissal reform that it wants to carry out with the impetus of the statement of the European Committee of Social Rights that seems to be favorable to UGT, as the complainant entity.
The coalition partners, PSOE and Sumar, agreed to “establish guarantees for people against dismissal”, comply with the European charter and reinforce causality to terminate the employment relationship. Although, the position of each of the political formations regarding the dismissal is disparate, as has been reflected in the responses of the State Attorney’s Office to the claim presented by Pepe Álvarez’s organization and also by CCOO, as published by this medium. Díaz advocates establishing compensation that is not assessed or has a preset limit to take into account the personal circumstances of the dismissed worker, something that does not convince the PSOE.
Neither does Podemos this position, which could end up being a key partner to carry out the reform, as has happened with the subsidy reform. The ‘purples’ want to put an end to the figure of unfair dismissal, so that the dismissal can only be objective or void and recover compensation of 45 days per year worked for this second case. If, on the other hand, the dismissal is due to objective reasons, Belarra’s training is committed to increasing the compensation from the current 20 days to 25 days per year worked if the company has not alluded to economic causes to justify this decision.
