The labor reform wanted to kill temporality and it did. At least in statistics. For years our country has not seen such an acceleration of indefinite contracts. A success, right? If we talk about the global number of signed contracts, yes. However, as we have seen in other Xataka articles, companies are looking for mechanisms to continue perpetuating this temporality under the guise of a fixed contract.
The data illustrates that one of those ways is the use of dismissal during the trial period. During this time, both the company and the worker can terminate the contract without having to justify the cause or pay compensation. And it comes from pearls.
Mocking the labor reform. It is no coincidence that from July 2021 to July 2022, failure to pass the trial period as a cause for termination of the contract has grown by 902.6%. In other words, it has multiplied by 10 compared to last year, before the labor reform. Entrepreneurs have found a shortcut to maintain that temporality that was intended to be eliminated. Since these last between two and six months, they are a perfect excuse to make “garbage contracts” disguised as indefinite and not have to pay severance pay.
It’s not illegal. This practice is not even a fraud. The problem is that workers end up chaining indefinite contracts without achieving the stability that these fixed contracts are supposed to provide. As this article from SMEs and the Self-Employed recalls, companies have penalties for very short contracts. But it seems that even that does not dissuade them from stabilizing their templates or reserving temporary ones only in case of a lot of activity or accumulation of tasks.
masked temps. As we mentioned in this other Magnet article, this has also led to an increase in discontinuous fixed contracts. This type of modality, although it is considered indefinite because it does not have an end date, in reality it is not. In practice, they perform a seasonal activity for a few months and are out of work for most of the year. In other words, companies hire under indefinite contracts, despite the fact that in reality They have already agreed how long the job will lastand suspend the contract at the end of that time.
As illustrated by statistics from Randstad Research with data from the Ministry of Laborin the first eight months of the year (and after the reform) the number of workers who have signed more than one indefinite contract in the same month has been 175,183 people, 11 times more than in the same period of 2021. Although the reform has prevented temporality (its main objective), it has motivated another equally precarious phenomenon: drastically increase the number of indefinite contracts signed each month. And above all, that the number of people who chain contracts of less than 30 days increases.
turn up the partiality. Another conclusion that we can draw from the first data after the reform is that the second cause of poverty in employment has increased: partiality. In the first trimester, almost half of the new permanent workers had a part-time contract, a figure that multiplies by eight the number of the years prior to the pandemic. Which leads us once again to think that job insecurity is simply moving from one modality to another.
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