The Labor Inspectorate is going to monitor the abuse of discontinuous permanent contracts with a special focus on the education sector, as admitted on Thursday by sources from the Ministry of Labor, who have recognized that this contractual modality is being misused even in the public sector, after EL MUNDO published today that these contracts have shot up 116% in the sector.
“There is not an adequate use of this contract and, therefore, the Labor Inspectorate is going to review without any regard, even if we are talking about public employees, if the discontinuous permanent contract is used in Education, in which cases it should be used and in which not.The irregular use of discontinuous fixed in Education is prior to the labor reform, but now we are going to return with a second campaign of the Labor Inspectorate putting the accent on Education as a sector in which abuses are taking place of that contract,” sources from the Ministry of Yolanda Díaz have acknowledged this Thursday.
His statements came after EL MUNDO published today that discontinuous permanent contracts in the education sector have skyrocketed by 116% in the last year, despite the fact that the National Court endorsed its ban on private education. In practice, these contracts are used, as has always been done, to send teachers and other workers linked to Education (canteen staff, cleaning staff, etc.) to unemployment during the summer and who cannot enjoy paid vacations like the rest of the groups.
“We have detected that depending on the autonomous community, there is the same activity that in some cases is covered with a discontinuous fixed line and in others not. Sometimes even within the same community there are discrepancies. We are going to launch a specific campaign that will pay special attention to the use of discontinuous fixed time in the education sector, to make it clear that this contract cannot be an instrument to avoid the enjoyment of vacation rights, but rather it has to be linked to seasonal factors or campaigns”, they have stressed.
From the Ministry they have promised that the Inspection will carry out “a rigorous control”, although they have wanted to unlink the use of this contract in Education from the labor reform. “It is prior to the reform and does not derive from any regulatory change, but from the use that the autonomous communities, which are responsible for Education, have given to this contract for a large part of the personnel at their service.”
The Inspectorate has sent 50,000 letters this year to companies that affected 140,000 contracts (a large majority of these discontinuous permanent contracts), with a special focus on the education sector, according to the Ministry.
In private education, the use of this contract is not allowed, since the national collective agreement for private education centers prevents it, a veto that has recently been endorsed by the National Court against the claim of employers in the sector.
According to Social Security affiliation data, the number of workers in the education sector with a fixed discontinuous contract has gone from 68,815 on average in January 2022 to 148,832 in January this year, 116% more, an increase of some 80,000 people that have been transferred from temporary contracts: full-time contracts have fallen by 11% -some 20,000 fewer affiliates- and part-time contracts have been cut by 48%, around 90,000 fewer people.
In total, 1.12 million people worked in Spain in the education sector at the end of March, of which only 27.4% had a full-time, permanent contract. The others are in a more precarious situation: 14% have a fixed discontinuous contract, 13% are permanent part-time, 24.3% have a temporary contract and 21.4% have an apprenticeship, training, internship or other contract. This total number of affiliates includes teachers of all educational levels and also those of academies (language, dance, etc.) and nursery schools.
Regardless of the type of contract, one of the main ills that workers in the education sector have is that they lose their job during the summer, both in the private and public sectors. According to Social Security affiliation data, in June last year the country had 1.03 million registered teachers (472,790 of them in the public sector), but in two months 180,000 people lost their jobs, that in August the number of members was 854,416. Of those 180,000 who stopped working last summer, 70,000 were from the public sector, where affiliation dropped to 402,493 employees in September.
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