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What we know about the new employment policy

| News | Employment Law and Social Security

Alfredo Aspra analyses the government's new labour policy and explains that too restrictive and strict regulation could lead to serious job destruction

The new government has arrived at Moncloa with a multitude of labour proposals under its arm. These changes do not only affect one leg of the labour market, but the whole of it. Amongst what we know from its various statements in the press are initiatives in the social field and in the field of labour recruitment and subcontracting. They will also be making several changes in the area of dismissals and, in addition, changing matters in the area of collective bargaining.

A too restrictive and strict regulation of subcontracting (current Article 42 of the Workers' Statute), limiting, conditioning or hardening the requirements to resort to subcontracting works or services belonging to the main company's own activity, could put at stake the serious destruction of employment or, at least, the attractiveness to generate it and attract investment from abroad and generate new projects that crystallize in an improvement of economic growth, whose main basis is employment.

This will be seen especially in sectors such as services, industry, the information and communication technologies sector, the automobile industry or the iron and steel industry. And this is not to say that we should evaluate other more profound issues, such as the constitutionality of the rule for violating the principle of the free market or the principle of entrepreneurial freedom clearly enshrined in our own Constitution.

On the other hand, the return to the priority of sectoral agreements in terms of salaries (fixed salary) is a reasonable and ideal measure but not, for example, in other areas such as the working day, working hours, shift work, etc., where entrepreneurial freedom should be maximised in order to adjust the conditions of each company to its needs, that is, to provide the company with flexibility so that it can continue to make progress in practices such as flexible working hours, disconnection, distance working, reconciliation of personal and family life, etc.

You can read the article in El Economista.

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