The precariousness of youth is tackled by taking measures

When talking about the worrying socio-labour situation of young people, there are those who maintain that there is nothing alarming about it because precariousness, like youth, heals over the years.

Thomas Osborne
Thomas Osborne
23 October 2022 Sunday 04:45
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The precariousness of youth is tackled by taking measures

When talking about the worrying socio-labour situation of young people, there are those who maintain that there is nothing alarming about it because precariousness, like youth, heals over the years. Others, however, are of the idea that precariousness is cured by implementing measures and transforming society.

The clearest example is the work we have been carrying out to approve a Statute for non-labour internships, also known as the Internship Statute. This Statute does not seek to regulate the training content. In fact, this rule is part of the labor legal system because the first thing it intends is to define the line that separates these practices from paid employment. For those situations in which a person is trained while working, there is also the figure of the training contract

In addition, thanks to this new regulation we will finally have a clear scope of application of non-labour practices, and a series of guarantees that prevent the perversion that has been committed around these practices in our country for decades, providing At the same time, students receive a set of rights, such as compensation for expenses, an individualized training plan that includes the conditions of the internship period or a Social Security contribution.

In the first place, the only ones recognized by the Statute will be those that are included in a study plan and, in this way, serve to improve the practical knowledge of students, knowledge that is considered necessary to obtain said degree. All those voluntary internships that were offered outside the qualifications distorted this objective because they did not seek a better practical knowledge of the students, but rather had been transformed into a first work experience -without rights, yes-, through which the companies they tested different professional profiles, but without assuming any responsibility in the process.

On the other hand, from UGT we have spent years studying the existing abuses in the different modalities of non-labour practices in Spain. Thanks to this, we know perfectly well how these frauds that perverted the nature of the practices were designed and how the interns were used to replace jobs without any right. Within the scope of the Statute, for example, a limit percentage of internships with respect to the total number of hours per academic year has been introduced in the university's own degrees. With this, it is intended to put an end to many cases of degrees from private centers that offered studies with 80% hours of practice, which in reality were nothing more than a provision of labor to companies for 6-9 months. This regulation also requires that there be a maximum number of interns per total number of staff, to put an end to those cases in which 70 and up to 80% of the staff were interns.

Lastly, the established catalog of rights will achieve the quality conditions that must prevail in these first contacts of students with the business world, making these non-labour internships attractive for those companies that really believe in a model that commitment to training, and thus distancing those others who only saw an opportunity to lower personnel costs.

In addition, thanks to the work in the Social Dialogue table of the business associations, an agile procedure will be maintained for the management and processing of these internships, facilitating the work of the people who are in charge of it, both in the companies and in the centers formative.

All this negotiation has been especially difficult because it affects a group that is usually unaware of the rights that protect it and where the limit of its training is and when it is being abused. Above all, there is a strong silence among those who have suffered abusive conditions while they were interns, because they fear that if they bring it to light it will harm their future career path. This is something that companies that carry out malpractice of this modality are well aware of. What is more offensive is that those who are called to protect and defend the interests of their students are the ones who, in many instances, facilitate the conditions that serve as a breeding ground for this fraud. These, who have been entrusted with the important and honorable task of providing an education to our future generations, participate in this abuse of scholarship holders in exchange for a handful of euros.

Paradoxically, the proper development and implementation of this statute will depend on them. That, for example, those curricula are updated where they understand that there should be more hours of internships or that they carry out a correct surveillance and follow-up of the internships and that these become periods of real learning in companies. I have no doubt that this will adapt at different rates depending on the type of training center and degree. The, until recently unjustly reviled, VT centers -where more non-labour practices take place- and the public employment services, will adapt more easily to the guarantees provided for in the Statute, while the universities, mammoth institutions, will be suspicious of any change that comes to them driven from outside, convinced in the idea that the precariousness of their students is cured over time.