The ordinary action of the Labor Inspectorate, plus the specific shock campaigns on temporary employment, continues to bear fruit. During the first seven months of this year, from January to July, more than 122,600 fraudulent contracts have been corrected. The majority, 69,600, are temporary contracts that have become indefinite, while the rest, nearly 53,000 jobs, are discontinuous fixed positions transformed into ordinary fixed positions.
In the case of the transition from temporary to permanent contracts, these 69,600 contracts are far from the 227,000 that were regularized during 2022, but from the Ministry of Labor they point out that there is a part of regularization that has already been carried out and that , since the entry into force of the labor reform, the number of temporary contracts has been drastically reduced, which would also explain the low number of corrected contracts.
On the other hand, this year the correction is greater with respect to discontinuous fixed contracts. If in 2022, 27,000 contracts became ordinary fixed, during the first half of this year the figure already exceeds 53,000.
This regularization is also related to the shock campaigns carried out by the Labor Inspectorate. This is the case of the 50,000 letters to companies that affected 140,000 contracts, which were sent from February to April, and in this case, the majority were fixed and discontinuous and with the focus on education. These are recurring campaigns focused on fraud in labor recruitment, which are repeated regularly with their own specifications each financial year.
In March of this year there was also another campaign, with 4,600 letters affecting 45,000 jobs, focused on temporary work companies. These are methods that the Labor Inspectorate adds to its ordinary work, with mass transmissions of communications to potential offenders, waiting for a correction of the situation without having to take additional steps.
In April, the Ministry of Labor acknowledged that the use of discontinuous fixed contracts in education is much discussed, but they consider that the labor reform will make it easier to review if it is used correctly. These types of fixed discontinuous contracts, which are designed to deal with the high seasonality of some economic activities, have caused controversy over how periods of inactivity are counted in unemployment figures, and are also a potential source of fraud that, precisely, the Labor Inspectorate wants to stop with these shock campaigns.
This was one of the objectives of the labor reform. On the one hand, legislation to prevent fraudulent temporary employment and, on the other, to complement this, mechanisms to ensure that this regulation is complied with.
It is a Labor Inspectorate that has experienced a turbulent period these months, with a strike by inspectors demanding better conditions to carry out their work, and a confrontation between two ministries, the Labor Ministry, on which the inspectors depend; and that of the Treasury, which controls the financial resources, on the resources that had to be developed. It was a friction between the two forces that formed the coalition of the Spanish Government, with the elections around the corner and the inspectors criticizing that the Executive did not fulfill its promises. An indefinite strike was called at the end of June, but it was suspended after a day and a half without the inspectors achieving their objectives. It is an issue that is pending before the next Spanish government.
