The ordinary action of the Labor Inspectorate added to the specific shock campaigns on temporary hiring continues to bear fruit. In the first seven months of that year, from January to July, more than 122,600 fraudulent contracts have been corrected. Most of them, 69,600, are temporary contracts that have become indefinite, while the rest, about 53,000 jobs, are discontinuous fixed ones transformed into ordinary permanent ones.
In the case of the transition from temporary to permanent contracts, these 69,600 contracts are far from the 227,000 that were regularized during the year 2022, but from the Ministry of Labor they point out that there is a regularization part that has already been carried out and that, Since the entry into force of the labor reform, the number of temporary contracts has been drastically reduced, which would also explain the lower number of corrected contracts.
On the other hand, this year the correction is greater with regard to fixed discontinuous contracts. If in 2022, 27,000 became ordinary fixed, in the first half of this year they already exceeded 53,000.
This regularization is also related to the shock campaigns carried out by the Labor Inspectorate. This is the case of the 50,000 letters to companies that affected 140,000 contracts that were sent from February to April, and in this case, the majority were of the discontinuous fixed rate and focused on education. They are recurring campaigns focused on fraud in labor recruitment, which are repeated regularly with their own specifications each year.
In March of this year, there was also another campaign, with 4,600 letters affecting 45,000 jobs, focused on temporary employment agencies. These are methods that the Labor Inspectorate adds to its ordinary task, with mass mailings of communications to potential offenders, waiting for a correction of the situation without having to take additional steps.
In April, the Ministry of Labor recognized that the use of discontinuous permanent contracts in education is highly disputed, but they consider that the labor reform will make it easier to review whether it is used correctly. This type of discontinuous permanent contracts, which are designed to deal with the high seasonality of some economic activities, has caused controversy about how periods of inactivity are accounted for in the unemployment figures, and it is also a potential source of fraud that, precisely , with these shock campaigns the Labor Inspectorate wants to tackle.
It was one of the objectives of the labor reform. On the one hand, legislation to prevent fraudulent temporary hiring, and on the other, complementing it, mechanisms to ensure that these regulations are complied with.
It is a Labor Inspectorate that has experienced a hectic period these months, with a strike by inspectors demanding better working conditions, and a confrontation between two ministries, that of Labor, on which the inspectors depend; and that of the Treasury, which controls financial resources, over the resources that had to be developed. It was a friction between the two forces that made up the government coalition, with the elections on the corner, and with the inspectors criticizing that the Executive did not keep its promises. At the end of June an indefinite strike was called, but it was called off after a day and a half, without the inspectors achieving their objectives. It is an issue that remains pending for the next government.
