The second vice president of the Government, Yolanda Díaz, is not only working on the configuration of her party, but also on a decree that could have an electoral effect in her favor among the youngest segment of the population.
The Ministry of Labor has reached an agreement in principle with the unions to regulate the so-called Scholarship Statute and put it into operation before the elections on July 23, according to what EL MUNDO has learned from sources familiar with the negotiation.
The CEOE employers have decided to stay out of this pact, although they have been informed. This statute regulates the working conditions of internship students and aims to prevent labor fraud with this group, as the Ministry has repeatedly stated. Not having business support, the pact is born fragile and without a safe horizon, if there is a change of government.
The employers’ association chaired by Antonio Garamendi has been rejecting in recent months the drafts promoted by the Secretary of State for Labor, Joaquín Pérez Rey, but, in addition, it considers that it is not time, so few weeks before the elections, to reach agreements on regulations of this nature. However, Díaz and the CCOO leaders; Unai Sordo, and from UGT; Pepe Álvarez, have decided to go ahead and agree on the Scholarship Statute. Pérez Rey has reached an agreement with a severe sanctioning regime so that the fines in case of “very serious infractions” can reach 225,018 euros. “In their minimum degree they will be fines of 7,501 to 30,000 euros; in their average degree of 30,001 to 120,005 euros; and in their maximum degree of 120,006 euros to 225,018 euros”, according to the agreement reached, pending formalization. It also includes compensation of expenses to scholarship holders.
Not only those who do curricular internships, but also extracurricular ones may be scholarship holders. To bring positions closer, it has also been agreed that those who enter into “extracurricular internships carried out during official undergraduate, university master’s or, where appropriate, doctorate, which do not exceed 15% of the hours in which they are confirm the ECTS credits (European Credit Transfer System) of the degree”.
Also those who participate in “internships carried out during studies linked to Universities’ own titles, when the total sum of curricular and extracurricular internships does not exceed 25% of the ECTS credits of the corresponding degree”. There is an exception in this case: “Own titles that have a minimum duration of 60 ECTS credits will have the possibility of establishing internships for a period of 3 months.”
The dissolution in Las Cortes obliges to process it as a decree and to its transfer to the Parliamentary Permanent Delegation.
From CEOE they express rejection of the terms of the agreement. The president of the Association of Autonomous Workers (ATA) and vice president of the employers’ association, Lorenzo Amor, insists that this type of law should not be approved during the electoral period: “It does not seem decent to us to close anything that mortgages whoever the Spanish decide will govern and without the participation of the legislative power”
“Regarding the scholarship holder’s statute, our position is the opposite. Firstly, because of the form: the approval of this norm is not appropriate in a period of dissolution of the chambers, nor is there an urgent and extraordinary need,” he adds.
And secondly, because of “the background”, because “it limits the number of hours so much and increases the bureaucracy so much that it will harm the practical training of the students, something essential to guarantee their employability and to build bridges between theoretical training and the world from work”
And there is another derivative that clouds the horizon of this agreement, in Amor’s opinion: “There are also discrepancies between the regulation of this norm and the recently approved university regulations, with which the risk of incurring sanctions due to lack of legal certainty is high”.
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