The Ministry of Labor is finalizing the regulations so that domestic workers cease to be a special case, so that the regime in which they are registered allows them to collect unemployment insurance and that dismissals cannot be arbitrary, that they have to be justified .
Tomorrow, the Congress of Deputies will take another step with the ratification of Convention 189 of the International Labor Organization, focused on the defense of this group, which the ILO itself describes as “undervalued and invisible, and which is carried out mainly by women and the girls”. However, the second vice president and Minister of Labor, Yolanda Díaz, wants to go further than that ratification.
“Not only are we going to legislate granting the right to unemployment protection, but we are going to go through ambitious legislation in which we are going to equate labor rights to domestic workers as well,” Díaz declared yesterday, after meeting with representative associations. of the sector.
The agreement in question “remains sparse”, said the vice president last week, and the truth is that already in February a sentence of the Court of Justice of the EU criticized that these workers do not have access to unemployment benefits. Not giving it to them is gender discrimination considering that 95% of the sector are women, the European court ruled.
Another of the elements that will be changed is the recognition of dismissal. The current “withdrawal” will be modified, which is the type of dismissal applied to these workers, by which the employer can terminate the employment relationship without having to justify the reason. You simply have to give twenty days advance notice if the contract is more than a year old, or seven days if it is less than a year old. In case of withdrawal, compensation is 12 days per year, with a limit of six months. However, for contracts prior to 2012, this compensation is reduced to seven days’ salary per year of service, also capped at six months.
Other changes that Díaz wants to introduce are the improvement of occupational risk prevention and the assessment of the work carried out by domestic workers.
These are the conditions that affect a sector in which some 600,000 people work, of which some 400,000 contribute to the special system for domestic workers, while the rest, 200,000, remain in the shadow economy.
“Bringing out the undeclared employment of these women is one of the main feminist demands of CC.OO.”, declared yesterday Carolina Vidal, secretary of Women and Equality of this union, who demands the obligation to make a written contract to the domestic employees, stating the working day, vacations, salary and functions to be performed.
For Carolina Vidal, the ratification of Convention 189 “is the beginning of the equality of labor rights.” An equalization that should allow their incorporation into the general Social Security system so that, among other things, they have the same unemployment protection as other workers. It is a step that the EU court called for in February when it ruled that excluding domestic employees from unemployment benefits “constitutes indirect discrimination based on sex in access to social security benefits.” “Let’s talk about unemployment protection, let’s talk about dismissal, not desistance,” Carolina Vidal set as objectives.
