We approve in #CMin the labor reform. A rule resulting from the agreement between the Government and social agents that represents a milestone in our legislation. We are advancing in a new framework of labor relations to guarantee the present and future of the workers.#WorkWithRights
– Pedro Sánchez (@sanchezcastejon)
December 28, 2021
“There are young people and women, I emphasize, who have not known a contract that is not garbage in their lives, and now we are going to give them the opportunity to break with the paradigm or the trap of precariousness,” the Minister of Labor and second vice president of the government, the communist Yolanda Díaz.
This reform turns “the page to precariousness in Spain, and this seems to me to be the great challenge we had as a country, the great deficit that Spain had and that is what makes us uniquely different in the European Union,” added Díaz.
The labor reform imposes that permanent hiring be the norm, prohibits the dismissal of officials for economic reasons, and permanently establishes the ERTE (Temporary Employment Regulation Files), a mechanism that was created during the coronavirus pandemic to prevent workers from lost their salary and employment due to the suspension of activity in their companies.
The bill approved by the council of ministers still has to be approved by Parliament, on a date that has not been specified.
The Conservatives’ labor market reform in 2012 was motivated by the need to reactivate the Spanish economy, devastated by the 2008 financial crisis.
It achieved a sharp decline in the unemployment rate, from almost 27% in 2013 to around 16% today, but at the cost of great job insecurity.