In the final stretch for the approval of the reform of the Special Regime for Self-Employed Workers (Reta), which the Ministry of Social Security must send to Brussels before the end of the month, the Government is preparing to regulate the right of self-employed workers to strike. The Ministry of Labour, headed by Yolanda Díaz, has relied on the involvement of 15 other ministries and a large number of other public bodies to develop the National Strategy for the Promotion of Self-Employment 2022-2027 (Endita), to whose draft the Economist has had access .is.
The Endita is the plan with which the second vice president of the Government intends to “strengthen the protection, training, labor rights and digital tools to which the self-employed have access.” This protocol, which is approved, only waits for the head of Social Security, José Luis Escrivá,.
The current legislation on strikes, contained in the Self-Employment Statute (Law 20/2007), points out that the self-employed worker has the “right to exercise public rights and liberties” regulated in the Spanish Constitution, which, as stated in Article 28.2 establishes this type of unemployment as a fundamental right.
The law that regulates this right (Royal Decree – Law 17/1997, of March 4) does not define the details but, according to the experts from Legálitas, it does mark a series of practical effects that exclude the self-employed: suspension of the relationship work, loss of salary during the period that the strike is supported and maintenance in the situation of special registration, which entails the suspension of the payment of certain amounts of Social Security contributions.
Therefore, the self-employed would not have the right to strike based on two reasons. In the first place, they cannot suspend their employment relationship because it does not exist as such. Secondly, they cannot reduce the amounts to be paid as Social Security contributions nor is there a special registration situation, since it is not provided for in the General Treasury of Social Security and in the complementary regulations.
This is even more complicated for those self-employed with contract workers, some 418,539 according to the data from Reta (updated as of March 31, 2022), who could not close their workplace as they could incur in an unauthorized lockout, which could lead to sanctions, serious or very serious, with a cost of between 626 and 187,515 euros, depending on the offense committed.
Under this framework, any self-employed person who wants to go on strike has to study what closing their business implies during that time and whether they can maintain it. In this way, you can carry it out as long as you do not have workers under your charge, although said termination would not entail a “special registration situation in Social Security”, they say from Legálitas, with reduced quotas and no one guarantees that, after the end of the strike, their clients will stay and their income will return.
What does the Endita propose?
This new plan by Yolanda Díaz, like the new reform that Escrivá is preparing, attaches great importance to the protection of the figure of the self-employed through improvements in their benefits, subsidies and working conditions with the intention of equating these services, more common among employed workers, the self-employed. From these theses was born the strategy that, within the framework of “measures to improve the regulations governing self-employment”, will approve the right to “professional unemployment”.
At the moment, the intricacies of the future regulation that Díaz “proposes to develop” are unknown, but that would place Spain under conditions of protection for self-employed workers such as those already in place in neighboring countries. For these proposals to go ahead, Díaz will create a group of experts to follow the progress of the regulations “with the aim of identifying possible weaknesses.”
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