No agreement between Labor, unions and employers to promote the Scholarship Statute

Government, unions and employers (CEOE) met this Monday to once again address the keys to the Scholarship Statute that have been debated for months. The social dialogue table wanted to give a “powerful and definitive impulse” to the text, whose objective is to regulate teaching periods and their relationship with work in companies carried out by young people.

But the deal still hasn’t materialized. CEOE sources say that after more than three hours meeting at the Ministry of Labor, the agents involved have not finalized the text because there is a lack of consensus on the proposal, so they have limited themselves to resuming the dialogue table and setting up a new meeting to on Monday, December 12. They explain that the ministry has promised to present a new proposal to try to bring positions closer and “overcome some of the points of disagreement.”

Entrepreneurs share the need to regulate the figure of the intern and give them greater guarantees, given that training periods cannot replace jobs. But they disagree on issues such as the exclusion of external academic practices or issues that may introduce greater legal uncertainty such as the text related to the presumption of labor or the one referring to the practices enabling the exercise of a profession, they point out from CEOE.

The intention of the Ministry of Labor was to “promote” the Scholarship Statute definitively. This was stated last Friday by the Secretary of State for Employment and Social Economy, Joaquín Pérez Rey, who assured that the purpose of the ministry is “to try to ensure that the Scholarship Statute has the greatest possible support.” And it is that last October a text was released to which the unions gave their approval but not the CEOE. The Government assures that it will work so that both unions and businessmen “give their support to the norm that will regulate the teaching periods,” said Pérez Rey.

The draft of the standard that came out a few months ago included that the number of people undergoing practical training in companies may not exceed 20% of the workforce of each company in general, although “any company may arrange practical training with two people, with regardless of the number of staff. This last point is designed for smaller companies and the self-employed. The CEOE objected at the time to the definition of scholarship that had been established considering that anyone who did not fit into it would be understood as an employee and asked to clarify this point.

For the Ministry of Labor, this norm, on which they have been working for months, is “very important” and they announce that they will make “all the necessary adjustments” so that it meets the objective of “putting a stop to irregular scholarships” as a formula for access to work. The idea is to offer a protection mechanism for the thousands of people who each year do internships in any type of company.