2023-06-10 19:34:56
Barely 24 hours after the Ministry of Labor and the unions reached an agreement to approve the controversial Scholarship Statute without the employers, the rejection of the university community and the business world has been frontal and very clearly, warning of the danger of a law that will make it even more difficult for students to find a job. They accuse Minister Yolanda Díaz of having presented the law on her behalf, without counting on their collaboration and outside the business fabric. A new confrontation between ministries is also opening, since Universities and Education warn that the public sector cannot take charge of the Social Security payment of its workers in practices that the new norm requires, in addition to accuse the minister of acting outside of them and ignoring “our experience and knowledge. They have not even consulted us”criticize sources from these departments.
For her part, the rectors conference (Crue Universidades Españolas) -made up of 76 public and private Spanish universities- has also charged against the statute. They consider the model an error because it will drastically reduce the offer of university internships. In a statement, the Crue defends that University student internships “are a strictly academic matter” whose legal regime should not be agreed upon. Although they do not question that the Government and the unions establish the border between what are academic practices and what are not, Crue is critical of the “interference” in aspects that are only the responsibility of the Ministry of Universities and in the universities themselves. Among them, rejects the “establishment of compulsory compensation for the expenses that the student internship may incur” and predicts that this aspect will lead to “a dramatic decrease in the number of companies and, above all, from public entities willing to host internship students”. Such compensation will “certainly” generate great complexity and difficulties added to the ordinary management of internships. Lastly, he insists on the “serious danger” for the continuity of the offer of internships that also suppose both the mandatory compensation and the inclusion of students in practices to Social Security “without, at least, leaving time for the universities to apply it.” He also warns of the “harms” of the measures for the Spanish student body.
In this sense, the network of University Business Foundations (RedFue) estimates that more than 1.15 million university and professional training students (650,000 from the University and 500,000 from FP) could be left without being able to carry out internships and will not be able to finish their studies, if the Scholarship Statute came into force. This organization, linked to 43 Spanish universities and more than 15,000 companies, shows its “frontal rejection” of Statute that Yolanda Díaz and the unions intend to approve “without the support of the educational community or employers” nor of parties as important as the Ministries of Universities and Education, the Conference of Rectors, the Social Councils and the Student Council, which “have also shown their rejection of the text and regret that it has not even been possible to debate it”.
They warn that, if this announced regulation is approved, 83 Universities and 3,823 professional training centers will not be able to comply with their study plan, lamented the RedFue in a statement, for what they see “an error to legislate in extremis, without consensus and without having listened to the educational community, which has not been allowed to be part of the design of academic regulations of a purely formative nature “. The network has reminded that 65% of the internships affected by the scholarship holder’s statute are carried out in public administrations and not in companies. It will be, therefore, “inapplicable legislation”, as it is already the one that deals with the contribution of scholarship holders to Social Security, which has seen how the universities, the “Ministries of Universities and Education are requesting a moratorium due to the impossibility of putting it into operation”. The ministries themselves have already contacted the universities to inform them that, If they do not take charge of the payment to the Social Security and its management, they will not accept internship studentsas is the case, for example, of the Foreign Office.
The network understands that, in our legal system, the regulation of the external practices of vocational training students and those of university students has been addressed on different occasions, by different regulations and with different denominations, but “It has always been designed from the field of training, never from the field of work”. The internships that are carried out in companies, institutions, in the training centers themselves, or in public and private entities, nationally or internationally, contribute to the comprehensive training of the student body and are an exclusively academic activity of a formative nature, has specified the grid.
Likewise, RedFue warns that with the new regulations Nor is the problem of the scarcity of training practices offered solved.since the educational system does not have a sufficient number of quality external training practices to respond to the demand made by universities and professional training.
However, The Ministry of Labor will go ahead with its plans because with this new norm “the definition of the limits of the practices is addressed, without equivocation to avoid niches of labor fraud” and that “severely limits extracurricular practices and what types of regulated education these labor practices may offer”. Internal sources have explained that the document, which is still being worked on, “plans to establish a sanctioning regime that will guarantee compliance with the norm” to create a “framework that will provide legal certainty, protect the rights of people who carry out internships in companies and will finally prevent scholarships from concealing precarious work”.
The employer CEOE forcefully disassociated itself from the agreement “both in substance and in form”, since it considers that “the approval of this norm is not appropriate in a period of dissolution of the Chambers nor is there an urgent and extraordinary need”. Regarding the substance, he believes that “it limits the number of hours so much and increases the bureaucracy so much that it will harm the practical training of students, something essential to guarantee their employability and to build bridges between theoretical training and the world of work. There are also discrepancies between the regulation of this standard 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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