The Government finalizes a battery of measures to protect the employment and help companies and self-employed workers affected by the DANA. The scheme on which the Executive is working is similar to the one that governed during the covid emergency and combines, on the one hand, restrictions on dismissal, with facilities, on the other, for companies to resort to the ERT.
Los self-employed workers They will also be able to request the cessation of activity that covered them during the pandemic and all these developments must go through a next Council of Ministers. Whether it is the ordinary one scheduled this coming Tuesday, or whether it is an extraordinary one that Moncloa could call in the next few hours.
The second vice president and Minister of Labor, Yolanda Diazwants to prevent companies affected by the storm, whether in Valencia or, to a lesser extent, in the areas of the Catalan coast, from resorting to layoffs if they have been affected by the storms. “The dismissal of people who have not come to work due to any of the indicated situations will be prohibited,” the Ministry said in a statement.
It remains to be seen the details of what the Council of Ministers ends up validating. And during the covid, the Government has already activated special protection against layoffs resulting from the effects caused by the coronavirus. The issue was that, due to the wording of the rule, what said protection did was make more expensive dismissal, not veto it, since the courts ended up interpreting it as unfounded and not null the terminations.
In its statement, Labor insists that “any unfavorable consequence for the exercise of absence rights will be null.” This would indicate that those employees who, with retroactive effect to the first day of the temporary period, have been dismissed for a reason linked to DANA, must be reinstated and compensated by the companies.
To give an alternative to the affected companies – there will be a part that will not be able to restart their activity in months -, the Government will encourage the appeal of temporary employment regulation files (PEA). Currently, a company affected by a cause of force majeure, such as an extreme storm, can now resort to this mechanism and suspend employment and pay for its staff, saving their salaries and the 90% of your Social Security contributions.
With which the part of labor costs is practically zero and the affected employees can collect unemployment benefits. To make it even more attractive, Social Security has announced that it will increase the fee exemptions from 90% to 100%, so that, in terms of salary, the employer receives the Erte ‘free’ and can focus all his resources on recovering the activity.
Another measure that the Ministry of Inclusion, led by Elma Saiz, will put on the table will be a cessation of activity improved. This benefit would be like ‘unemployment’ for the self-employed and ensures a minimum income while the self-employed worker cannot work.
The amount of said benefit is 70% of the regulatory base, so the final amount will depend on what fee the self-employed person was paying before the DANA. If you pay the minimum fee, the benefit will be 514.7 euros monthly and the maximum amount is capped at 1,350 euros (225% of the IPREM)
An improvement that Social Security will introduce is that this termination will be without a waiting period, that is, it will not require having contributed a minimum amount of time to request it. Therefore, both a self-employed person who has been contributing for 20 years and one who registered two days before DANA can request it.
Another is that “the days of benefit consumed are not computed for future situations (counter at zero) and, in addition, this period is computed as contributions,” according to what Social Security has advanced.
Although you will always be obliged to justify and prove that your business has been prevented or affected by the storm and it will be the mutual insurance companies that will decide whether to grant or deny it.
