The Government agrees with the unions and outside the CEOE the Statute of Scholarship Holders

2023-06-09 19:10:52

The second vice president, Yolanda Díaz, wants to leave the Scholarship Statute tied up before the end of the legislature and that is why she has finally chosen to leave employers on the sidelines and agree only with the unions on the new norm that will govern the labor relations of the students in practice and will force everyone to contribute to Social Security, as confirmed to this newspaper by sources of social dialogue.

After a long year of negotiations, the workers’ organizations and the Ministry of Labor reached an agreement in principle this Friday to approve this regulation before the general elections that will impose sanctions of up to 250,000 euros on companies that carry out some type of discrimination against the scholarship holders, according to the latest draft sent to the social agents. UGT and CC OO, however, specify that there are still “some fringes”.

The text, which also limits the hours that this group will be able to work, includes a large part of the union demands, such as the clear definition of the practices to avoid fraud, financial compensation to students for expenses incurred by work activity -such as the displacements–, or the establishment of an “effectively dissuasive” sanctioning regime, as they pointed out to this newspaper from the UGT.

However, the unions have not managed, once the employers have distanced themselves from the agreement, to return to the original text, in which extracurricular practices were suppressed, those that, unlike the curricular ones, are voluntary and do not form part of the curriculum. It does not even set a longer term for their removal, but only limits them.

Limit to practice hours

Specifically, Díaz will now allow all university internships to be maintained but under two requirements: they will have to be linked to the studies they are studying (currently this requirement does not exist and they can work in any company) and limits them to a maximum duration: that they do not exceed 25% per academic year of the time of the total credits of the degree in question and a maximum of 480 hours per course.

The CEOE expressed to this newspaper this Friday its position “opposite” to the new Statute of Scholars, which also has the opposition of the Council of Rectors of the universities. The employers consider 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, since it will have to be approved by royal decree law.

In addition, it warns 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.” Likewise, the employers emphasize that there are “discrepancies” between the regulation of this law and the recently approved university regulations, with which “the risk of incurring sanctions for lack of legal certainty is high.”