A total of 8,225 companies have requested the Department of Work to renew their temporary employment regulation file ( ERTE ), just over half of the files that were open at the end of September. After the new extension of aid for covid ertes, companies with an open file had until October 15 to resubmit the documentation to the labor authority to renew said file and the aid associated with it. Eight out of 10 files are concentrated in the province of Barcelona.
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The data collected by the Departament de Treball does not include how many workers will be affected by those 8,225 files . To questions from EL PERIÓDICO, sources from the Department explain that they are currently studying the files and that they cannot give that figure, because in each company the impact of the file may be different and suspend all or only a part of the workforce. And the affectation can be total or partial. According to Social Security data, in Catalonia there were a total of 14,916 active workers at the last day of September, affecting 47,949 workers.
The new extension of the ertes was agreed between the Government and the social agents after a tough negotiation. The conditions of said agreement incorporate the will expressed by Social Security to link the aid to training commitments for its affected workers.
The Administration will pay for a large part of this training, but companies will have to pay a part and guarantee that their employees have completed it, in order to improve the qualifications of their staff or re-qualify them so that they can access other jobs.
These trainings must be coordinated by the companies with the SEPE and must be 30 hours for companies with between 10 and 49 workers, 40 hours in companies with more than 50 workers and micro-companies with less than 10 employees will be exempt.
Social Security pushed to include this training commitment with the intention of continuing to pressure companies to reinstate their workers and that they no longer remain in employment. Or, if the activity did not really allow such reactivation, that they take advantage of the time to improve their employability.
Minister José Luís Escrivá has anticipated this Monday that, with the current membership data, he projects a “very intense” reduction in ertes covid by the end of the month. In Catalonia, according to available data, this figure has already fallen by half.
