The Labor Inspectorate will once again use the letters as an instrument to regularize irregular situations. He did it successfully on previous occasions, with the ERTE, and now he will use them against fraud in temporary contracts, according to sources from the ministry. There are three consignments of letters that will go out starting tomorrow addressed to 83,600 companies in which a potentially fraudulent use of fixed-discontinuous and temporary contracts has been detected. In total, they affect 199,800 workers.
The sending of this correspondence was announced last week by the Third Vice President and Minister of Labor, Yolanda Díaz, although without setting a date. It will be tomorrow and the objective is that companies, after receiving notification of a potential irregularity, react on their own to correct it. Experience shows that this is often the case for many companies when they receive this type of correspondence.
For Work, it is about ensuring the proper functioning of the labor reform, which has as one of its main objectives to reduce temporary employment. According to the latest data, he is succeeding. In April, practically half of the new contracts were of an indefinite nature, in contrast to 10% in December, that is, before the labor reform came into effect.
A reform that drastically limits the use of temporary contracts and that, as an alternative, proposes permanent-discontinuous ones, especially designed for jobs with great seasonality. In her interventions, Yolanda Díaz, has defended the indefinite nature of this type of contract, although it maintains intermittent periods of inactivity. “You can review each and every one of the Spanish Labor Law Manuals, as well as the 2,976 resolutions that the Supreme Court has issued on this matter and I challenge you to find a ruling that says that this contract is temporary,” the minister said to a popular deputy who questioned these types of contracts.
On the other hand, the reform has also increased the penalty for irregular hiring. The main change is that with the new legislation, each worker in a fraudulent situation is punished, and not just one infraction per company as before. In addition, the maximum fine has also been raised, from 7,500 to 10,000 euros.
