The second vice president, Yolanda Díaz, said on Tuesday that she was in favor of eliminating the current limit on severance pay and promoting new legislation that promotes ‘a la carte dismissal’. This was recognized during the press conference after the Council of Ministers, in which he celebrated the recent ruling of the Superior Court of Justice of Catalonia (TSJC), which raised the compensation for unfair dismissal of a worker to 48 days, compared to 33 days established by law.
This is the second ruling by a Court that increases the cost of dismissal that governs Spanish law and that is especially relevant in the current scenario, since the Council of Europe must rule in the coming months on whether Spanish compensation is “sufficiently repairing and proportional “, after the complaint filed by UGT. This could force the rule to be changed, something the Minister of Labor is willing to do.
«This sentence comes to say what I have been saying for a long time. They have always heard me talk about how we focus on compensation and we have to see the cause of the dismissals, “said Díaz, who defended that” compensation must be appropriate to other types of factors and there should not be capped compensation as Spain has. Thus, he called for waiting to see what Europe resolves but acknowledged that “it is clear that we are having a problem with this issue.”
The decision of the TSJC -which is dated last January- ¬ considers that the compensation of 33 days per year worked is “clearly insignificant, it does not compensate the damage caused by the loss of the job nor does it have a deterrent effect for the company” .
The magistrates have based their argumentation on the regulatory framework of Convention 158 of the International Labor Organization (ILO) and article 24 of the European Social Charter. Thus, the text cites another ruling of the same court from last November in which it states that, in exceptional circumstances “in which the legal and assessed compensation is notoriously insufficient, a higher one may be set that reaches to compensate the total damages ( consequential damage, loss of earnings, non-pecuniary damage…) that the unlawful act of dismissal may have caused».
The ruling also indicates that the dismissal decision “in any case reveals an excessive exercise of the right to dismiss”, since the company began an ERTE a few days later in the context of the pandemic, which would have allowed the affected party to have retained his position and would have availed himself of the extraordinary measures on unemployment protection.
Despite this, the court admits that the dismissal “was not acausal”, since there were economic and productive causes, but it calls them circumstantial.
New touch to the CEOE
Díaz, on the other hand, once again gave a call to attention to the CEOE, which he accused of having got up on May 5 from the table where they were negotiating with the unions for the salary increase of the workers covered by the agreement and urged businessmen to sit down again. “We need the collective agreements,” he proclaimed.
In this sense, he stressed that the Government has complied by raising the SMI, for which he asked the social agents “to be at the level of our country, because this crisis -he specified- wages are not causing it.”
Likewise, the minister considers that the criticism of Garamendi, who accused the Government of treating businessmen “unfairly”, is due to “ideological” issues and reminded him that the Executive overturned “the best social protection mechanism” during the pandemic to save companies and workers.