Tense day at the first Employment, Social Policy, Health and Consumer Council (EPSCO) of the new European Commission. The second vice president and Minister of Labor, Yolanda Díaz, has led the rejection of the Hungarian proposal for the future Directive on intern workers with which Europe seeks to stop the figure of the ‘false intern’ because, she has denounced, it fails to comply with the premise initial.
The directive that EU Labor Ministers are debating today was presented last March by the European Commission with the aim of ensuring throughout the EU that practices are not used to camouflage regular jobs, through controls and inspections, and that interns have the same conditions as employeesincluding payment, unless the differential treatment is justified by objective reasons. In these initial steps, the plan included all scholarship recipients, regardless of their employment status, including internships that are part of formal education curricula and those necessary to access specific professions.
The aim is to end the situation of labor abuse indicated by data from the European Commission itself, which indicates that in 2019 there were 3.1 million people in internships, of which only 1.6 million received remuneration. However, the compromise proposal presented by the Hungarian government of Víktor Orbán, which holds the rotating presidency of the EU Council this semester, “would mean precariousness for an entire generation,” Díaz defended before his counterparts at the EPSCO hours before. of the vote that will take place at 5:30 p.m.
Specifically, the Spanish minister emphasizes that the proposal restricts the scope of application excluding internships that are part of the formal education and vocational training curricula or those that are carried out within the framework of active employment policies, among others. Furthermore, it opens the door to discriminate against interns by establishing justifying reasons of different treatment for interns, makes the fight against false practices difficult or avoids the usual references to the community acquis that guarantee the full application of labor regulations, among others.
“Going to the model that is being developed today by the Orbán presidency is precisely the model of degraded labor relations, that is, ‘low cost’ and with unhealthy companies. […] It is unprecedented that a directive that has to do, nothing more and nothing less, with promoting labor rights and giving security to people who are in training practices see your rights laminated“, he added. Díaz demands a directive that provides labor rights to trainee workers and that gives relevance to training within internship periods: “It is essential to prevent internship periods from being used to replace people company workers.”
Get the support of eight other countries
“How are we going to allow that our young people be used as cheap labor hiding it under the label of ‘training’.[…] Spain cannot give its support to regulations that do not advance labor rights. And we will not do it until we have a text that truly protects workers, in direct application of the Social Pillar,” Díaz insisted. Not only Spain shares this opinion. As indicated by the Ministry of Labor, Díaz has achieved support of Germany, Romania, Belgium, Portugal, Austria, Bulgaria, Slovenia and Cyprus to prevent the Hungarian proposal from succeeding.
The Minister of Labor recalled that in Spain measures have already been taken in this regard in the latest labor reform, which guarantees the rights of people in labor practices and clearly distinguishes training activities from properly productive and labor activities: “With our labor reform, we protect people with training contracts”.
The European conflict with false scholarship holders runs into the stagnant Scholarship Statute which he has been preparing for years and which Díaz hopes to be able to approve in 2025 to end the labor abuses and lack of protection that are hidden behind this figure. In this regard, he reminded his European colleagues that his portfolio will bring to Congress “a project that will guarantee the rights of intern students by ending their exploitation, after reaching an agreement with the unions.”
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