Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

One of the main impacts of the Great Recession has been the increase in the rate of unemployment in Spain. Unemployment has a negative impact on the wages of workers, which, in those pension systems where pensions are computed according to wages, eventually affect pension benefits. In this contribution we estimate the impact of these detrimental effects on Spain’s pensioners’ welfare. According to our estimates the average pensioner is expected to lose the equivalent to 18 monthly payments of the initial pension entitlement. Additionally, the poverty risk faced by pensioners is estimated to increase between 10.6 and 24.6 per cent due to the effect of the Great Recession.

The context of pandemic and declaration of a health emergency in Argentina brought about a normative succession of executive decrees of necessity and urgency of the Presidency of the Republic, resolutions of the Ministry of Labour, Employment and Social Security and other administrative regulations, with direct incidence on the individual working relationships and projections at the collective level. This exceptional situation, in a social and regulatory sense, is addressed in this study focused on the exercise of the right of strike in the aforementioned context, especially considering that the exceptional regulations have declared some activities and services as "essentials in the emergency" that exceed the framework of essential services listed in the law in order to limit the indicated right. The author tries to answer the question about the hypothetical assimilation or distinction between both qualifications of "essentiality".

Social legislation derived from the state of alarm is intended to minimize the impact of COVID-19 on the business fabric and on employment. In this context of sanitary, social and economic crisis, alluvial normative production has been registered, with a succession of provisions of different rank and origin which introduce new measures or extend, modify or reinterpret others previously adopted, in order to adapt them to the changing demands from the emergency situation caused by the coronavirus. The purpose of this essay is to analyze the institution of suspensión of contract and reduction od working timne due to force majeure or objective causes related to Covid-19, a central piece of social law generated during the pandemic, leaving out of the study the treatment of unemployment protection.

In Spain, article 2 of Royal Decree-Law 2/2020, March 27, raises a serious legal interpretative problem. Although the Spanish Government seems to be seeking a prohibition against the dismissal of workers due to the crisis stemming from the covid19, in the legal text it is not at all clear that it is a dismissal with a prohibited cause and, therefore, would not entail the nullity of dismissal, but only severance pay (the cost of business arbitrariness). The first judicial cases have assumed that there is such a cause for annulment. However, the reasoning given to reach such a conflictive solution is extremely weak, technically not very rigorous, so it is highly likely that these decisions will be reversed by the higher judicial instances. In any case, the price of this defective legislation is the extreme increase in legal insecurity, in an increasingly stressed legal systemct.

The judgment reiterates doctrine on abuse by the Administrations of the recourse to contracts or temporary relationships to meet permanent needs. It denies that stabilization (contract or relationship as permanent employee or equivalent statute) can take place through the judicial channel, however it contains some interesting thesis. Among the most outstanding contributions, the following should be noted: the consideration of “successive” links in relation to the breach of the obligation to call the selective provision process; the affirmation that the employee could never suffer prejudice for having consented to the succession of temporary contracts or relationships; finally, the referral to national courts of the task of judging whether the compensation provided for the unfair dismissal is sufficient to prevent abuses in temporary employment.

The current pandemic is not just a health crisis. It is what in the social sciences —in the most solvent direction— is technically described as a ‘total social fact’, in the specifics ense that it impacts and convulses all social relations and structures, and shocks all actors (political, social and economic), institutions and the values of society, posing a requirement of recomposition of social cohesion.

Presentation.

Resumen.

This judicial Order rejects to issue a preliminary injunction, on occasion of the coronavirus pandemic, requested by a labor union representing salaried home caregivers.

The impact of the COVID-19 has been felt suddenly and without notice in employment. From the beginning of the crisis, with Royal Decree-Law 8/2020, urgent mechanisms were put in place to contain employment and continue productive activity (modifications to the ERTES, quota exemptions, extraordinary unemployment benefits, extraordinary cessation of activity...). During the course of the pandemic, these have had to be modulated and extended. This is what RDL 24/2020 of 26 June aspires to, which arises largely from social dialogue. The measures contained in it have the hard work of connecting an extraordinarily tortuous period with normality, but the current rates indicate that this favorable scenario will take a little longer to arrive and will inevitably require new ones.