The Ministry of Labor and the unions have signed this morning the statute of the intern, the regulations that will regulate the conditions in which the students in practices will carry out their port side and that have as one of their objectives to end potential fraud in this field.
It has been signed by the Vice President and Minister of Labour, Yolanda Díaz, and the General Secretaries of CC.OO., Unai Sordo, and UGT, Pepe Álvarez. It is the result of more than a year of negotiation and the truth is that when, with the call for elections, its approval was already considered impossible, the ministry and the unions have stepped on the accelerator to get it out. An objective in which both the CEOE and the rectors of the universities are against, and that its approval has not yet been assured. The statute must go through the permanent deputation of Congress, and the groups that habitually support the Government, such as PNV and ERC have not confirmed their favorable position.
After the signing, Yolanda Díaz remarked that “the time for using young people as disposable workers, for using young interns as phantom wage earners, is over.” Both Díaz and the general secretaries of the unions have highlighted the value of social dialogue and the numerous agreements reached in this field during the legislature, and all have lamented the absence of the employers’ association in the agreement.
The CEOE opposes it both for substantive reasons and for formal reasons, it considers that it does not have the urgency to process with the Parliament dissolved. And the rectors of the universities reject the obligatory compensation of the expenses that the internship student may incur, in addition to considering that the internships of university students are a strictly academic issue, where unions and employers should not intervene.
There are three main elements of this regulation. From the outset, the maximum number of students per company is set, depending on the templates, the number of tutors needed, as well as certain limitations, such as the fact that these training activities cannot be carried out at night or in shifts, except in exceptional cases. Compensation is also established for travel expenses and, where appropriate, accommodation and subsistence, if they are necessary for the student to carry out the internship.
To this first section, a second limiting the number of practices is added. A limit for the curricular (25% of the hours of the total credits of the degree, master or doctorate) and also another for the extracurricular. These internships, which are those that are not part of the study plan and where a good part of the discussions have focused on the negotiation of this regulation, are limited to 15% of the hours in which the credits of the degree or a maximum of 480 hours. The text defines these extracurricular internships as those that “having the same purposes as curricular internships, are not part of the corresponding study plan, but are directly related to the studies completed and whose objective is to apply and complement the knowledge acquired in the academic training”
A third outstanding element of the regulations are the sanctions, with fines with an ascending gradation. In those considered very serious, in which discrimination is added to non-compliance, the fines will range from 7,501 to 30,000 euros in their minimum degree, in their average degree from 30,001 to 120,005 euros and in the maximum, from 120,006 to 225,018 euros.