Business revolt before the new Statute of the Yolanda Díaz Scholar: fewer positions and fewer FP graduates
The Scholarship Statute -still undefined- continues to be quite controversial and generating rejections, and even more so after last Saturday, Yolanda Díaz, Minister of Labor and Social Economy, announced an agreement with the unions, but without the support of the Spanish Confederation of Business Organizations (CEOE). The employers' organizations of private education and the rectors have come to the step rejecting the proposal. They assure that, if they go ahead, fewer companies and public entities will want to welcome these students.
The objective of the norm, which has been in negotiations for more than a year, is to regulate the working conditions of internship students and develop a legal regime that orders them. Basically, it includes a penalty regime for companies for breaching the rights of students, with fines of up to 225,000 euros; it limits extracurricular internships to 480 hours, and establishes compensation for the expenses incurred by students, such as travel, accommodation or maintenance.
For organizations, this issue belongs to an academic and not a labor sphere, so they consider that the Statute for people undergoing non-labor practical training in the company sphere is the responsibility of universities and not of the social dialogue table. They even warn that the rule “puts at risk” the qualification of vocational training students.
The private education employers ACADE, Education and Management and CECE have issued a statement in which they oppose the announcement made by the Ministry of Labor. They ensure that the norm that has been agreed bilaterally with the unions does not address the problem of the scarcity of training internships, but rather exacerbates it, and does not take into account the reality of the vocational training system, as it was negotiated without having the educational community, even without the participation of the Ministry of Education and Vocational Training.
“It is a rule that, if it comes into force, will put a brake on the new model of dual professional training, supported by the majority of all the actors involved,” they explain in a statement.. “It calls into question public-private collaboration, which is one of the axes on which this model is based,” they allege.
For this reason, the organizations request “that legislation not be legislated in extremis, in the pre-electoral period, without having listened to the entire educational community”, and without solving the real problems and creating others that will make it practically impossible for the students of professional training access training stays in companies, essential for your degree.
According to data from the Ministry of Education and Vocational Training, 426,441 students took the FCT module (Training in Work Centers, internships in companies) in the 2021-2022 academic year.. Another 45,613 students took the Dual Vocational Training modality in the same academic year.
Likewise, the employer organizations point out that the forecasts of students enrolled in VET courses for the 2022-2023 academic year amount to almost 1,100,000 students.
A THREAT TO THE MODEL
For its part, the Conference of Rectors of Spanish Universities (CRUE) has also ruled against the proposal, pointing out that it constitutes a threat to the internship model in force in the Spanish university system.
“The internships of university students are a strictly academic matter and it is not understood for what reason, unions and employers have to agree on their legal regime,” asks CRUE in another statement. They are also radically opposed to the establishment of compulsory compensation for the expenses that the student internship may incur, since they consider that it is an unprecedented provision in our Law and whose immediate consequence will be a dramatic decrease in the number of companies and, above all, everything, from public entities willing to welcome students in practices.