The Government wants to impose prison terms of between six months and six years, and a fine of six to twelve months, to employers who repeatedly fail to comply with labor legislation. The two parties of the coalition, PSOE and UP, have presented this Friday a battery of amendments in the Congress of Deputies in which, in addition to proposing a new crime of illicit enrichment of public leaders, they propose a reform of the Penal Code to toughen the regulations against business managers who repeatedly violate the rights of workers.
According to the text of the legal proposal, which La Vanguardia has been able to consult, the coalition proposes a new section in article 311 of the Penal Code to persecute constant business attitudes contrary to the legislation. Specifically, for managers of companies that "impose illegal conditions under formulas unrelated to their employment contract."
The penalty will be imposed "on whoever imposes illegal conditions on their workers through their hiring under formulas unrelated to the employment contract, or maintains them against a requirement or administrative sanction." This is the proposal that should not have excessive problems in the parliamentary process.
The legal modification persecutes, for example, attitudes of companies dedicated to the delivery of food at home that continue to operate with a majority of autonomous 'riders' and refuse to incorporate them into their workforce, despite the fact that they have been sanctioned. It must be remembered that the Ministry of Labor fined the Glovo company 79 million euros last September for operating with a fleet of 10,600 false self-employed workers in Barcelona and Valencia.
It is a demand of the unions that now has its embodiment in a proposal for legal reform. The objective is that businessmen who persist in illegality despite having received sanctions "do not get away with it," the president of the United Podemos parliamentary group, Jaume Asens, has exposed in the lower house.
The Second Vice President and Minister of Labor, Yolanda Díaz, had already announced a month ago from Brussels, in an appearance together with the Commissioner for Employment and Social Rights, Nicolas Schmit, this legal modification. She referred to the accidents of these workers and the rights that they would have if they belong to the company staff.
The two formations of the Government have also presented another amendment to modify article 557 bis of the Penal Code and that this norm "does not serve to persecute peaceful protest, when violence or intimidation is not used", Asens has indicated. This is a change that seeks to annul the reform that the PP undertook during the protests of the previous economic crisis.
The objective of this change is to clarify the consideration of street protests and guarantee the right to peaceful demonstration. CCOO had already warned that eliminating the crime of sedition could affect union activities. The Government seeks, therefore, not to harm the workers' protests, a right included in the Constitution.
"It is about linking long-term and prison sentences to subjective elements such as intimidation" in the case of worker mobilizations, Unai Sordo explained to La Vanguardia. The General Secretary of the Comisiones Obreras considers that "one thing is the exercise of violence, which obviously cannot be consented to, and another thing is to determine what is intimidation" in the case of street calls. The union has been an active part in this legal change, with fluid dialogue in recent weeks both with Moncloa and with the Second Vice Presidency and United We Can.
