The historic dana of last October 29 has not only left a human drama, with at least 215 deaths confirmed so far in Valencia, but also an economic drama with thousands of deaths. Despite the presentation of both temporary and termination employment regulation files (that is, ERTE and ERE, respectively), with some 284 files affecting only 3,014 workers until Friday, the Generalitat Valenciana expects a flood of applications next week, as confirmed to this newspaper by the Secretary of Employment of the regional government, Antonio Galvañ.
“The logical thing is that next week the large volume of files will arrive,” said Galvañ, who estimates that the vast majority will be ERTE, as until now. The reason, he explains, “is that the ERTE, if applicable, can later be transformed into an ERE.” Both unions and employers agree with Galvañ in his forecast, especially after the foreseeable approval of the labor shield in the Council of Ministers on Monday, to save jobs and the industrial fabric of the area that represents 22% of the Community’s GDP. Valencian. “Everyone waits like air to breathe an extraordinary standard. The impact is very brutal, we will only see the real dimension when this standard is passed to the BOE [Boletín Oficial del Estado]”says Daniel Patiño, secretary of union action of the Workers’ Commissions (CC OO) in the Valencian Community.
For its part, employers are very angry with Labor for not counting on them to create this labor shield that includes measures such as the annulment of dismissal or paid leave for those who are absent from work. This second point generates “a lot of concern,” says Salvador Navarro Pradas, president of the Valencian Confederation of Entrepreneurs, especially because the range of cases to benefit from this permit is wide and not limited to the territory. That is to say, as can be seen from Díaz’s words and in the absence of knowing the specification of the rule in the BOE, a worker in Barcelona could, for example, miss his job for the time he considers appropriate due to having a family member. in some affected area and having to go to help.
Among the reasons to justify their absence, workers may cite cleaning tasks, searching for family members, transportation or mobility problems, lack of connectivity and care for ascendants, descendants or other emotional ties. “It will be a small percentage, but as always there will be people who will want to exceed when using this permit. It is the point that worries us the most,” says Navarro, who asks that “demagogic” messages not be sent, since both employers and workers agree from the beginning that “personal safety comes first.” “We are all in this together and we are concerned that the ministry only considers one point of view and not the other,” he adds.
Díaz has also cited, among the possible causes of absence, the physical or emotional damage suffered by the affected workers, but in these cases they must choose to request the new leave due to temporary disability due to the effects of the dana that the BOE published last Tuesday. The latter must be requested from the family doctor and will be paid by Social Security from the first day of absence.
Another point that worries the employers is that it is limited to companies with registered offices and not to all those affected by the damage, whether or not they have their domicile in one of the 69 Valencian municipalities affected.
CC OO, for its part, awaits clarification on the different types of possible scenarios in which an ERTE of force majeure can be requested, which allows greater exemptions in Social Security contributions for companies and workers. Furthermore, the companies covered by these files will not have to pay the salaries of the employees affected by the ERTE, but rather the Public Employment Service (SEPE) will pay them.
The aforementioned union, like the employers’ association, welcome the implementation of force majeure ERTE, since there are many possible scenarios in which a company could be affected by the damage without being in one of the areas affected by it. An example would be Ford Almussafes, a key plant for Valencian industrial activity with 4,100 employees that is intact, but has suffered the loss of a key supplier, Industrias Alegre, which is located in Catarroja. Patiño also mentions other types of cases, such as the fact that it is not the company that is affected, but rather its main client that has been hit by the damage.
In the case of , although this has not yet been approved. “The labor authority, which must approve the files, is waiting for the promised Labor standard to begin giving approval to ERTE due to force majeure,” says a union source.
