The Minister of Labor, Yolanda Díaz, is gradually resuming the plans she had when she came to the Government.
The change of the PP labor reform has already returned to his immediate agenda.
Not that it had disappeared.
It has never done so, but it had been postponed due to the need for an urgent response to the pandemic.
Although before reaching this point, there is another: the false autonomous and the
riders
.
"Next week I am going to summon the social agents [to clearly regulate the difference between wage earners and the self-employed]," he answered in the special program organized by EL PAÍS in which he answered questions from workers, unemployed and businessmen about the market labor, ERTE, precariousness and their next plans for the future.
Regarding this next appointment of social dialogue, she began by pointing out that from the first moment she has always made it clear that the distributors of digital platforms "are not entrepreneurs."
However, he admitted that he had been surprised by the Supreme Court ruling on a Glovo dealer who settles the legal dispute over whether the
riders
are salaried or not.
"It has been very forceful."
So much so that it has led it to go beyond what it had originally thought, to be more ambitious in the regulation that it plans on this group.
This is how he explained it to talk about the ruling: “What we thought he was going to say has transpired, it clearly tells us that these companies are not intermediaries.
It opens our focus ”.
In the same vein that some employers' leaders express privately, Díaz pointed out that, for her, these types of companies make unfair competition since they assume lower labor costs than others in the same sector that do hire their distributors, one of the latter would be Just Eat.
But in Spain, the labor reform, with all its political significance, always attracts attention.
“During these months we have shown that the legislation of the PP does not work for the current situation.
We have circumvented the labor reform ”, he reiterated on several occasions.
And that leads him to settle in his initial position: "We are going to undertake the first part of the government agreement on this."
That means that they are going to start by changing collective bargaining and ending the primacy of company agreements.
"Let the negotiators themselves decide which is the reference agreement for each sector."
Díaz has always been critical of the changes in collective bargaining introduced by the 2012 reform because "they have broken the balance" between employers and workers.
His intention now would be to “rebalance” that relationship by giving back to the negotiators of the sectors, where the unions have more strength, the possibility of deciding which agreement prevails: the company or the sector agreement.
The other points that it intends to address are the ultra-activity or indefinite extension of the agreements until their renewal, which in 2012 was limited to one year, and the regulation of subcontracting.
"Sometimes in this there are levels of unfair competition between companies," he pointed out about subcontractors.
Participants in the program also asked Díaz about unemployment and the difficulties of the elderly to return to the job market.
He spoke of "drama" and took the opportunity to anticipate that in the 2021 budgets the item dedicated to active employment policies will grow by 30%.
“We are going to redirect them in the sense that Europe is asking of us.
Making outlines and individualized itineraries ”.
The reform of employment policies is one of the pending subjects in Spain.
The reports periodically issued by the European Union with recommendations usually point to the need for governments to undertake this change, something that has not been done so far.
Díaz went into more detail when talking about discrimination against older women in the job market in the selection processes.
One of the participants invited him to legislate to prohibit the need to specify sex and age in the curriculum.
The minister recalled that this has only been done in France but was receptive.
"We are going to study it well and take action, because being a woman and over 40 it is clear that it does not matter what experience you have or being a great professional [because there will be discrimination]."
Youth unemployment, an eternal problem in the labor market, was also present.
His figures, above 40%, seem "intolerable" to Díaz.
For her, this is not due to the qualification of younger workers, who are “hyper-qualified”.
The minister points to one of the traditional culprits pointed out from many areas: "The productive model."
“Young people do not have a training problem.
We have a very biased production model towards the service sector.
And this expels them.
I always give a piece of information, in Spain training contracts are not used because there are cheaper and more precarious formulas ”.
However, he also pointed to the "culture of precariousness and that of temporality", therefore he invited companies to change it.
“Without a doubt, the rules have to be changed.
Since 1984, we have been promoting a legislative framework that rewards the expulsion of young people from the job market.
And another factor that we have is a deeply aging market, we cannot tackle the digitization of this without young people ”.
Among the topics that were addressed in the program, were also the ERTE.
Díaz pointed out that at present "there is no collective record without recognizing or paying."
Although he did acknowledge that there may be problems in individual cases.
A participant pointed to one of the points that they are negotiating with the social agents: greater protection through benefits for workers affected by ERTE compared to those who are unemployed.
"You are right," he admitted, "we have convened a dialogue table and the social agents agree to give protection to people."
Díaz refers to the extraordinary subsidy that this summer he had finalized with unions and employers, but he has not quite succeeded.
Since the extraordinary regulation of ERTEs was approved, a recurring theme is how long the mechanism and exceptional aid will be maintained.
"As long as it is necessary", reiterated Díaz, who does not miss the occasion of remembering that dropping a tool that, in his opinion, has worked "would be a huge mistake."
And this time it did so supported by the latest advice from the IMF, which this week has warned of the risk of withdrawing social and economic aid prematurely.
One of the problems seen during the pandemic has been the difficulty of the collective of artists to access ordinary protection against unemployment of other workers.
Asked about this, the Minister of Labor stressed that the current regulation is from 1985. "We are working with twentieth century standards," she described.
Given this, he promised, “with the Minister of Culture” [José Manuel Rodríguez Uribe], to “develop a statute for the artist as soon as the pandemic allows it”.