According to the Minister of Labour, Yolanda Díaz, in an interview with La Sexta yesterday, any company that takes advantage of an ERTE as of June 1st will maintain the current prohibition to dismiss any employee from their workforce during the following six months. She made it clear that there is no possibility of eliminating this requirement form the extension negotiations.
This means that any companies that want to continue benefiting from the advantages of ERTEs will have to keep all their employees until at least December. This was one of the big obstacles in the negotiation of the last extension, and everything indicates that it will continue to be so now, since the employers unions have warned that many companies are in a critical situation and will have to cut staff if they want to stay afloat.
Even organizations such as the Bank of Spain have positioned themselves in favour of making adjustments, something that, on the contrary, the Government categorically rejects as well as the unions.
In the last negotiation the CEOE tried to make the Government more flexible on this clause, and demanded right until the last minute that companies only had to return the exonerated social contributions of the workers they dismissed, not those of the entire workforce, something to which the Government will surely demand again in the first meeting on May 6th.
Diaz also hinted that the new extension will be very similar to the one we have now, since "it has worked very well and if it’s not broken, it doesn’t need fixing." "Reopening a debate on what mechanism we want does not make sense," she defended. However, both her Social Security counterpart, José Luis Escrivá, and the vice president of the Government, Nadia Calviño, have suggested that in the new extension they will give more bonuses to reactivated workers than to those who continue in ERTE, in the style of what they did last summer.
Díaz did not want to enter into the controversy of the term of the new extension, although Escrivá already has already said that it will be for three or four months again, probably until September. "Let's not close the door because we can’t afford to make a mistake at this stage, but of course this mechanism will continue until it is necessary," she said.
What Díaz did specify is the current number of workers who continue in ERTE: 650,000 today, of which 200,000 have a part-time suspension and the rest are ERTE suspended in sectors which are "very affected" by the crisis, such as tourism and travel agencies, culture and transport. This means that in the month of April they have been reduced by almost 100,000 due to the easing of restrictions.
