2023-06-11 12:11:30
“We finally have an agreement with the unions to no longer have fake interns or scholarship holders and have the Statute that our country deserves”, the second vice president of the Government made public this past Saturday, Yolanda Diaz. The also Minister of Labor took advantage of her summoned appearance to assess the electoral agreement of summer and another agreement was signed with the social agents for his curriculum: the new Scholarship Statute.
The norm accumulated more than a year of delay, since Work has been giving rope and margin to the employer to try to attract it to an agreement. However, Trabajo decided to shut it down at once, without new meetings involved and only with the unions, one day before Sumar’s public presentation.
In the absence of seeing if said rule gathers sufficient parliamentary support to be validated before the general elections on July 23, university rectors, businessmen and pressure groups have come out in a rush to criticize the new statute. They predict a “dramatic decrease” in the offer of internships available to students, given the obligation of companies and universities to pay for transport and material for their interns.
And it is that one of the main novelties of the Scholarship Statute will be the obligation for any company or institution that welcomes a student to do an internship to pay for his transport and material. Or, failing that, give him a minimum remuneration that covers said expenses. The philosophy of the norm is that the internships do not imply an additional cost to the intern. And for those entities that do not comply with this obligation, the law contemplates sanctions of up to 7,500 euros.
From now on, it will be companies and universities (one of the main centers of curricular and extracurricular internships in Spain) who must assume the cost of travel, material and accommodation -in the case of stays abroad or outside the habitual residence- . What is added to the obligation that will enter into force from the next academic year to pay a minimum contribution to Social Security for all students in practice. Something that has not sat well among the pagans of these news.
The Ministry of Labor intends to put a stop to the abuse -repeatedly denounced by youth organizations- that some companies and institutions carry out of the figure of the student in practice, sometimes associated with ‘cheap labor’. According to the latest data from the Labor Inspection, each year the ‘labor police’ detect around 1,000 fake interns who are carrying out tasks typical of a worker (without their salary or their social protection).
“immediate threat”
“It constitutes a threat to the internship model in force in the Spanish university system.” This is how the Conference of University Rectors of Spain (CRUE), in a statement, has defined the latest draft of the Scholarship Statute, still pending validation by the Council of Ministers. In his opinion, the obligation for themselves and for the companies to have to pay for transport -where they put the emphasis- will imply “immediately” a “dramatic decrease in the number of companies and, above all, of public entities willing to accept trainee students”.
In addition, the leaders of the university centers brand Labor and the unions as intruders for trying to regulate something that, in their opinion, is a “strictly academic matter.”
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Entrepreneurs do not look favorably on the regulations either and brand their approval in the discount time of the electoralism legislature by Yolanda Díaz. “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”, say employers’ sources CEOE.
The Network of University-Business Foundations lobi has shown itself to be more catastrophic. “More than 1.15 million university and professional training students could be left without internships and would not be able to finish their training if the Scholarship Statute comes into force,” said this entity, linked to 43 universities and 15,000 companies, in a statement. According to his calculations, the one who will assume the greatest cost with the new regulations will be the Administration itself, since 65% of the practices are carried out within it.
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