WAGES have gone down by an average of 10 per cent, and the typical redundancy pay-off to 26 days' salary per year of service, according to research by three recruitment agencies.
Adecco, the Sagardoy Foundation and the Excellence in Sustainability Club – which all form the official Observatory for monitoring the government's labour reform – studied 200 companies, most of which have a minimum of 50 employees.
They say redundancy pay has gone down, but remains on the whole higher than the requisite 20 days' salary per year of service which is the legal minimum for a 'fair dismissal'.
This means that where a company makes staff cuts due to finances, restructure or other legitimate reasons which it can prove beyond all reasonable doubt, it has to pay this minimum to employees when making them redundant, but where a dismissal is not justified or the company cannot prove the reason – or in certain cases, where firms wish to cover their backs – the minimum rises to 45 days' salary per year of service.
Job contracts are more likely to be part-time or temporary rather than full-time, permanent positions and larger companies are opting to take on new staff with 'training and apprenticeship' contracts, which run for a limited duration and with a lower wage, now that these have been created by the labour reform.
Overall, the Observatory says firms of 50 or more employees have doubled the number of 'training and apprenticeship' contracts they give out since this time last year – from 8.1 per cent to 16.6 per cent.
The number of companies which have made redundancies, slashed pay or restricted working conditions to the detriment of staff has grown in the same period from 72 per cent to 76.2 per cent.
This said, only 10.6 per cent of organisations reducing their payroll have awarded the minimum redundancy package, with the remaining 89.4 per cent giving more.
Over a third of companies have cut their staff's hours to less than 15 per cent of their previous timetables in an attempt to avoid redundancies, and mass redundancy is now less frequent than individual dismissals for either objective reasons – financial, or a person's job 'disappearing' due to restructure – or disciplinary reasons.
Read more at thinkSPAIN.com