45% of the activity of temporary employment companies relies on permanent temporary workers, a possibility that the latest labor reform has opened up. However, the formula also gave rise to a risk of abuse in its use, to which the second vice-president, Yolanda Díaz, launched an intense inspection offensive. And the campaign is bearing fruit: contracts of this type signed by ETTs have fallen by 13% since the start of the year, while the number of these companies is at a historic low.
The standard approved at the end of 2021 provided that ETTs could hire workers under this modality to make them available to their customers but with a clear limit: they are only authorized to to cover temporary positions. This novelty aimed to compensate the sector for the disappearance of employment and service contracts and other restrictions on temporary employment and it was the result of arduous negotiation with employers.
As a result, discontinuous fixed-term contracts signed by ETTs increased from 0 to 233,376 in 2022 and 353,363 in 2023. So far this year, they total 195,985 and represent 13.3% of all those signed by these companies. However, their weight in the company is greater: They are the protagonists of 45% of contracts made available to other companieswhich reach 1.2 million so far this year. This implies that each permanent discontinued employee hired by an ETT passes, on average, through 6 different companies.
In principle, this development seems consistent with the very intention of the reform: to guarantee these workers more opportunities to have a series of jobs compared to temporary jobs, for which the ratio of secondment contracts barely reaches 1.1. In other words, the ETT signs a new contract for each worker mission. Discontinuous permanent employees, on the contrary, maintain the contract in force between the different vocations..
But the intensity with which this transfer occurred set off government alarm bells. Discontinuous fixed-term contracts concluded by ETTs represent just 15.3% of the total in this category signed so far this year, but those made available equate to 91.4%. This raises the suspicion that many companies could save money not only by hiring their own permanent employees, but also by making their temporary employees permanent by taking advantage of these workers from temporary employment companies.
As? Use them to complete tasks which have a clearly recurring or seasonal character and cannot be justified as possible due to peaks in activity. This is precisely what the labor reform sought to avoid, which explicitly limited the transfer of discontinuous permanent contracts “to the temporary needs of the various user companies”. It is for this reason that in the middle of last year the Labor and Social Security Inspectorate launched a first campaign to send letters to businesses, 4,600 letters, which affect some 45,000 “work relationships”, a strategy which has been followed throughout 2024.
Although the Ministry of Labor has not specified exactly how many “regularizations” of discontinuous permanent positions have taken place nor how many correspond to ETT workers, there is data which suggests that this offensive has hit ETTs: the hiring of discontinuous permanent positions by this type of companies accumulated throughout the year decreased by 12.7% compared to the first eight months of 2023, and its weight increased from 14.9% to 13.3% of workers hired to be assigned to. But the trend is increasing from month to month: in August, 17,000 were registered, or 24.4% less than a year ago.
Thus, discontinuous fixed-term contracts have gone from counteracting the decline of temporary employment contracts to accentuating it. The latter fell in August at an interannual rate of 5.6%, while in the same month discontinuous fixed assets fell. with an intensity almost five times greater.
This drop in hiring This is about STD survival itself. So far this year, 226 operations have been recorded, 14 fewer than during the same period in 2023. If this trend continues at the end of the year, it would not only mark a low in the series historical, but but it would instead record the largest annual decline since records have existed.
Junts comes to the “rescue” of ETTs
The weight of employee transfers remains high and has even increased by 31% even if, as we have seen, This means fewer workers making more calls (more precisely 6 per person). This is why the Labor Party wants to go further and is preparing a modification of the registers. improve the information available on the possible “misuse” of discontinuous fixed lines.
The department headed by Díaz drafted a ministerial decree that reforms the regulation of employment companies to adapt it to the contractual terms in force after the labor reform. Although many changes are purely technical, it also reviews the “operational communication of the activity of temporary employment companies to the Ministry”according to Asempleo sources.
But under that apparently bureaucratic veneer There is no obligation for ETTs to indicate in much more detail the type of positions occupied by their permanent discontinuous employees, even classifying contracts that replace. This will make it easier to detect when they are used to cover functions for which the user company You should hire your own worker.
This situation also a surprising political derivative. Junts, which is negotiating its support for budgets with the government, wants to lift restrictions on ETTs’ use of discontinuous fixed lines. The independence party chaired by Carles Puigdemont thus recognizes the demands of the sector (with a high weight in Catalonia).
It does this through a series of amendments to the bill which transposes the European directive on transparent and predictable working conditions. The idea is that provision contracts can be used “for the execution of work of a seasonal nature or linked to seasonal productive activities” or in cases where “being of intermittent supply, they have certain execution times“.
This proposal would represent a turning point from those established in labor reform and would disavow Díaz’s own strategy. The nationalist formation is hiding behind a judgment of the Court of Justice of the European Union of March 17, 2022, which determines that these companies “can occupy permanent jobs provided that they do so on a temporary basis”. Even if it means preventing the creation of a new stable job in the user company.
