THE OLD TOPO THE LABOR REFORM, A DEBATE

I

The end of the political year culminates with the announcement of the pact on the labor reform. And, for the first time, it is not a rights cut. In itself it should be considered good news. It is not about the repeal of the 2012 labor reform, but neither is it a mere cosmetic exercise. For it to have been a radical reform, the Government should have approved it in the same way that the PP did: without negotiating (or doing so only with the unions). But this would have been a high-risk exercise because he would have faced not only the bosses and their political allies, but also some of their possible parliamentary backers, all the major media and the European Union. We are not intervened, but we are still supervised. Not only for being members of the EU. but, above all, due to the high level of external indebtedness.

Debt has always been a powerful mechanism to impose loss of rights. At different historical moments, debts have turned many people into slaves, prisoners, or forced migrants. And at all times debtors have been exploited by their creditors. In the recent past, the countries of Southern Europe were forced to apply harsh adjustment measures because of the debt. For example, Greece was forced to apply a labor reform. The resistance of the Greek government had the only effect of creating a commission in which the EU appointed three members and the Greeks three others. One of the three proposed by the Greek government, the German economist Gerhard Bosch, disseminated the opinion and told us about his experience. The starting point of the European Union was very radical, along the lines of the Spanish reform of 2012, but the opinion of the Commission was much more measured than the initial proposal and displeased the hawks in Brussels. By the way, among the hard-line members of the Commission there were two Spaniards, one of them an economist from the Bank of Spain. I tell this story because I think it helps to put various issues in context. Both the role and the European demands, which until recently have aligned themselves with the most radical neoliberal line, as well as the role played by a part of the Spanish technical elites (academics and high officials) in defending these radical theses. Something that helps to understand the difficulties that defenders of a deeper labor reform have had to face. A confrontation that has taken place not only between the negotiating parties, but also within the Government itself.

II

The changes introduced by the reform affect key elements of the 2012 reform, previous reforms and the consolidation of the protective framework put in place due to the confinement.

The main change that has to do with the 2012 reform is in the field of collective bargaining: the one-year limitation of ultra-activity is eliminated and primacy is given to the sector agreement in salary matters. Ultraactivity means that the rules of a collective agreement remain in force until a new one is signed. Guarantees acquired labor rights. The PP limited its validity to one year, after which the old agreement was extinguished and a favorable situation was generated for negotiating new agreements at a lower price (some companies tried to impose leonine agreements, which ended up generating contradictory court rulings). It was also a way of laminating sectoral agreements and generating a framework of labor relations limited to the company or the workplace. The experience around the world is that, where this model predominates, in many companies agreements are not negotiated and the minimum wage and the rest of the basic legal norms (for example, on working hours) end up being the only elements that protect labor rights. . The return to indefinite ultra-activity and the fixing of salaries by sectoral agreements opens the possibility of reinforcing collective action in a country where small and medium-sized companies are predominant. However, a complete recovery in this field has not been achieved. At the last minute, the business representatives managed to have the day also included in what will be defined at the sectoral level. And neither has a broad sleeve been revoked for companies to drop the agreement, nor has the possibility of negotiating changes in working conditions at the company level through personnel commissions created ad hoc, and in which companies usually have enough can.

Secondly, modifications are introduced in terms of contracting and subcontracting models that modify substantial aspects of the entire set of reforms that have taken place since the early 1980s.

First and foremost, it is about giving priority to the permanent contract and limiting the possibility of using employment contracts. A long concern of unionists and iuslaboralistas, that of limiting temporary contracts to objective situations. The reform introduces various mechanisms to achieve this objective: greater specification of the circumstances that allow for temporary contracts, shorter periods of temporary employment (both in normal contracts and in training and internship contracts), the works contract is eliminated and service (which was the great sieve of uncontrolled temporary hiring), the permanent construction work contract is recovered (something that was lost many years ago) and a substantial increase in fines and levies on fees is established of Social Security to companies that try to evade permanent hiring. It should also be noted that although the severance pay established by the 2012 reform is maintained, it is still very far from what the defenders of the "single contract" intended, which in practice meant that everyone it would be fixed but the dismisses completely free.

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Regarding subcontracting, progress is less substantial and the fine print and its interpretation remain to be seen in detail. In fact, subcontracting is allowed and the only thing that is required is that the salary of the agreement for the sector of the activity carried out by the subcontractors be paid. In other words, if security personnel are hired, they are paid according to the security agreement and if computer maintenance is subcontracted, that of computer services. There are several vanishing points here. One, included in the text itself, the possibility of paying the subcontracted company instead of the sector agreement if it has its own agreement. The other is that it starts from a supposition in which the subcontractors are auxiliary activities, different from those carried out by the company that carries them out. But the experience of recent years, as is the case with hotels, shows that outsourcing reaches core activities of the company itself. And that the use of ETT and multi-service companies (which may have their own agreement) has constituted a brutal mechanism of salary devaluation. In this field the reform leaves too many open fringes.

The last major reform package is the introduction of the ERTE used in this pandemic as a permanent adjustment mechanism in the event of a recession. The objective is to allow companies to adapt to the drop in activity without generating layoffs. It is a mechanism copied from the German model and it worked quite successfully there in the 2008 crisis and here it has been quite effective in containing unemployment (while in the 2008-2014 crisis, for every 1% drop in GDP, more of 1% of employment, in the current recession the drop in employment has been 0.5%).

III

The balance that can be made is that this is an important reform, aimed at reducing some of the most bloody aspects of the previous regulation, but that continues to leave a lot of power in the hands of the companies. It is not a total repeal of the Popular Party reform, but neither is it a mere aesthetic makeup of what exists.

The government, and especially the people from Unidas Podemos who have piloted the process, can be blamed for not fulfilling their promise to repeal the entire reform. The mistake was in launching a forceful slogan that could not be fulfilled. Too often the left tends to take a thick line and forgets to explain the complexity of situations, opening up a huge range of possibilities for professional demagogues and all-or-nothing players. But you have to understand their satisfaction after reaching an agreement that improves a few things, that generates tensions on the right (not only in politics, but also within business organizations), that meets deadlines and opens possibilities for union action. And I think that with all the limitations and exceptions it must be accepted as a relative success. This is how the UGT and CC have also welcomed it. O.O.; When reading the statements of its leaders, one appreciates both the sensation of progress and the awareness of the things in which progress has not been made.

Given the announcement of the agreement, the response from the right-wing and the most recalcitrant business sectors follows the logic analyzed by Albert Hirschman in Reactionary Rhetoric: the agreement is useless, it is dangerous, it will have the opposite effect to what was sought. Nothing new under the sun. We have already seen it on previous occasions, for example in the increase in the minimum wage. And we can find it in the face of any reform proposal that touches or reduces some of the many injustices and privileges of real capitalist societies. The curious thing is that some of the critics of the left point to this same scheme of a reform that undoubtedly has vanishing points. One sometimes has the feeling of being permanently in the middle of a friendly fire where some exaggerate the impact of the measures they take and others criticize without nuances. A dynamic that fails to generate a rational culture among the social base that in theory all left-wing activists aspire to mobilize. The panglossism of the institutional left and the irredentism of the radical may end up facilitating the terrain where the kings of right-wing demagoguery prevail.

IV

Is this reform going to transform the rules of the labor market? It's hard to know. There are numerous examples that show that indeed changes in regulations and policies end up having a significant effect on behaviors and dynamics. But the rules do not play in a vacuum: they depend on the action that is exercised with them, on how the public sector works effectively, on how people mobilize.

What is certain is that the bosses are going to move to neutralize as much as possible their most relevant effects. It has many resources for this. Recently we have already seen it with the entry into force of the riders law aimed at controlling the working conditions of delivery platforms. The first reaction of some of the most relevant companies in the sector, for example Glovo, has consisted of hiring important law firms that have designed a contractual model aimed at circumventing the law (and at the same time promoting a pseudo movement of workers in favor of be autonomous). We must expect all kinds of maneuvers, starting with the parliamentary process itself, to delay, block, discourage, twist and adulterate the operation of the regulations that are most harmful to their interests. It is to be expected, pure class struggle.

To counteract them, it is necessary for the Administration to fully play the implementation of the measure by putting into operation and providing resources to the labor inspection in matters of inspection and, where appropriate, sanction. But above all it is crucial that unions and the working classes use this new framework to advance labor rights. Rather than enter into a sterile debate on the reform itself, it is necessary to find strategic proposals for action that effectively serve to mobilize, motivate, and organize a salaried class that has been ignorant of its strength and rights for too long. And here too, we should try to overcome the sterile debate about who is to blame for this situation and instead seek action practices that are positive for everyone. Every time that trade union organizations or any social movement get involved in discussions about who is to blame for the bad correlation of forces, enormous energies are dissipated, resentments are generated that prevent more cooperative and inclusive work. We should take this reform, partial, imperfect, insufficient, as an instrument to make it a starting point in the reconstruction of collective identities, rights and utopian proposals. Work so that the current one is only the first in a succession of reforms for the benefit of the social majority.

Source: Meanwhile.org.

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