The European Union is questioning the public procurement policy in Spain just as the process of stabilizing the workforce is underway to convert around half a million temporary workers into indefinite ones in the different versions: from temporary to temporary with years of seniority in the Administration. The Court of Justice of the European Union issued a decision yesterday in which it is considered that “indefinite non-permanent” staff should become permanent.
Isabel Araque, union action secretary of the UGT, explained yesterday that the decision “does not affect interim workers, but only the legal figure created by different rulings of the Supreme Court called indefinite non-fixed”. According to the opinion of the UGT and also of CC.OO., temporary workers are left out, since it only focuses on the working staff. Interims are those who occupy a position temporarily of a career civil servant and labor personnel are reinforcement workers for a specific function and limited in time. The problem is that in both cases there are many who have been in this situation for years.
On the other hand, there are lawyers specialized in defending interim and temporary workers in the Spanish public sector, such as Javier Araúz, who argue that “this sentence necessarily leads to the transformation of all public workers who are victims of abuse into permanent jobs”. In his opinion, the sentence rules out previous solutions, such as conversion to indefinite non-fixed, compensation when the contract is terminated and the call for stabilization processes.
Isabel Araque believes that the sentence is not binding, but recommends that the problem be solved. “The UGT has always been in all the processes to help workers to get out of temporary employment”, he adds.
The different Spanish administrations carry out a multitude of processes to reduce temporary employment to 8% of the workforce at the end of the year. The Generalitat, for example, reported this week that 90% of long-term temporary workers passed the workforce stabilization process and are now civil servants. Those who did not succeed were compensated with an average of 15,000 euros. According to Araúz, the sentence may cause the interim workers who were left out of the stabilization processes to be reinstated in their positions in application of the sentence.
Sources from the Generalitat said they are analyzing the sentence and declined to comment on the matter. Something similar was said by the Ministry for Digital Transformation and Public Service. “The model that has been defined by the ministry for the modernization and transformation of the Administration aims to reduce the temporary and precarious rates that exist”, they said from the ministry, without value or interpreting the sentence.
CC.OO. he pointed out in a statement that the sentence is “another setback to the recruitment policies that have been carried out by public administrations”. Ministry sources added that, of the commitment made “to reduce 300,000 temporary positions before the end of 2024”, 75% has already been fulfilled.
