Unions warn of "fine print" in parliamentary agreement on interim civil servants

The Minister of Finance and Public Function, María Jesús Montero, this Wednesday in Congress, where she defended the validation of the decree to regularize the interim.EUROPA PRESS / E.

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POOL - Eu / Europa Press

The parliamentary processing of the decree for the regularization of temporary public employees, with an agreement

in extremis

of the PSOE with United We Can and ERC that avoided a defeat in Congress, modifies some of the points that the Government had agreed with the unions.

Changes about which the centrals did not know anything, according to various union sources consulted.

They insist on asking for "greater specificity" about the changes that are intended, to guarantee legal certainty and the viability of the future standard.

Both CSIF, the majority union among officials, as well as UGT and CC OO agree that we must wait for the processing of the decree as a bill, the procedure that the PSOE parliamentary partners demanded to modify it, to see how the final text is left .

Something that the unions will be very attentive to because any legal slip in the wording could derail the process.

More information

• The Government saves by one vote and with assignments to ERC the decree to make more interns permanent

The first of the changes agreed in Parliament is the time limit to start the procedure. The decree endorsed this Wednesday indicates that the Public Administrations must approve the places, the first step for the subsequent call for the selection process, before December 31 of this year. But that date will disappear in the future regulation because, according to the agreement, a maximum period of four months will be set from its entry into force. A priori it is not a big setback. Since the procedure in Congress is undertaken urgently, the agreement itself establishes that the process will begin in September and the new law should be ready in mid-October. If this deadline is met, the Administrations would gain a month and a half of margin and would have until the middle of February to approve the places.

The regularization, according to the calculations made by the Government at the time, will affect some 310,000 temporary workers in the public sector. Most of them are temporary, although there may also be staff with a temporary contract. According to the latest data available from the Ministry of Finance, last January Spain had more than 622,000 interns. The reason that the Executive lowers the number of affected to practically half is due, according to CSIF sources, to the "small print" of the decree. This does not affect all temporary positions, but those that have unjustifiably been for more than 3 years without a call for opposition. And it also contemplates other exceptions.

In CC OO they warn of the difficulty of making this type of estimates, since finally it is the Administrations that will have to see position by position which ones fall within the requirements. This is precisely the first phase of the process, the approval of the positions. And the bulk of interns, always according to data from the Treasury, is concentrated in the autonomous communities, which add up to more than 530,000 since they manage health and education, the two major sources of public employment. In the union led by Unai Sordo, they consider, however, that the Government's figures fall short and raise the impact to between 450,000 and 530,000 public employees. This is the result of calculating, on the total of temporary jobs that there are, the percentage of temporary employment to which Spain has committed. According to the plans sent to Brussels,in December 2024, when the regularization ends, the public sector will not be able to have more than 8% temporary. Today no autonomous community has a percentage below 14%.

The modification of initial terms is not the only one that brings the parliamentary agreement with respect to what the Executive had agreed with the unions in the General Negotiation Table of the Administrations.

ERC and Unidas Podemos demanded two changes: that in opposition competitions the examination phase is not necessarily eliminatory and that officials with more than 10 years in a position without a call for a position do not have to go through the opposition.

Both measures have left an uneven taste in the mouth of the unions: the first is liked;

the second raises doubts about its legal reserve.

In an interview with Cadena Ser, the general secretary of UGT, Pepe Álvarez, assured this Thursday that some of the measures announced now had been considered by the unions and the Executive rejected them "alleging unconstitutionality."

Non-eliminatory opposition

The decree establishes the general framework for accessing public positions, both in the merit phase (the contest) and in the examination phase (the opposition). This second has to be approved to get the place. But the partners of the PSOE asked that in the parliamentary procedure this requirement be abolished "and the exercises of the opposition phase may not be eliminatory." Héctor Adsuar, spokesperson for the Public Area of ​​CC OO, points out that his union made a proposal based on what is already done in some processes, where the cut-off mark is not set at the approved one, but lower depending on the scores aspiring stockings. "What seems to be raised now is that there is no cut-off note," says Adsuar, who points out that we will have to wait to see the drafting of the bill to "see the legal viability."The aforementioned CSIF sources do not put any special qualms on this point, which they see as "positive." If finally it is each Administration that will have to decide if the opposition is eliminatory in its calls, remember, the unions will be vigilant in the negotiations to try not to be.

More doubts raises the other great change with respect to the original decree. This is to eliminate the opposition, accessing the position only on merits, "for those groups of public workers who have occupied a position uninterruptedly in the last 10 years and who have not published the corresponding public announcement", as stated in the parliamentary agreement. In CSIF they see it controversial: “We think that the 10-year criterion at this time introduces more uncertainty than certainties, we want to see in writing what criteria are established because this is a fly-by-night announcement. It can generate discrimination ”, maintain the sources of the union, who recall that the doctrine of the Supreme Court is that the abuse of temporality occurs after three years.

Adsuar also does not hide certain concerns: "What worries us about any modification is that without legal certainty you enter a loop of appeals to the Constitutional Court and you no longer comply with the agreement because the process is prolonged." An explosive situation because "the Administration is very large and there are many cases", which led the unions to agree on a very measured text with the executive. The movements in Parliament will now give them more work to ensure that the regularization does not derail: "We will meet with the parliamentary groups and we will be in the committee to monitor the agreement, any modification has to be impeccable", concludes the CC OO spokesperson.