For the reform of the Labor Code to have sufficient merits of a great agreement, it must cover unemployment
It speaks very poorly of the labor reform project that it lacks an agreement between the parties (employers, workers’ representatives and the State) on the controversial layoff, whether to modify it or to replace it with another more efficient instrument, which ensures both the protection of the worker who loses his job, as well as the strengthening of a dynamic business sector (this is so important that the protection of the worker who loses his job, because it is a loss, will be minimal and ephemeral).
There are ample reasons to make the commitment to seek an alternative to unemployment, even within the framework of it itself: firstly, because for decades the employer sector has felt unemployment like a sharp pebble in its shoe.
And, secondly, because international and local experience indicates that although unemployment provides resources to the worker who loses his job to finance himself during the time he remains unproductive, it is an instrument that has been questioned.
In a recent installment we had echoed a work by ECLAC, authored by Mario D. Velásquez Pinto, in which it is observed that compensation is regularly associated with undesirable effects, such as forcing resignations, early dismissals and behavioral aimed at causing dismissal as the only way to obtain such benefits.
And there have been no shortage of third parties who keep part of the pie, since labor disputes on the matter regularly constitute the largest workload of labor courts in Latin America, which shows that this benefit, in many cases, is not necessarily received by the workers or, at least, at the time when it is actually required. The Dominican Republic has not been immune to that reality.
In the case of unemployment insurance, Velásquez Pinto’s study states that the available evaluations indicate that this type of programs do not constitute a safety net for the poorest workers, since in general, these programs benefit salaried workers in the lowest deciles. means of income.
As we had pointed out, the evaluation of the ECLAC report shows better results in the case of Individual Unemployment Savings Accounts, which offer the advantage of “internalizing the cost of unemployment benefits in workers, since they are part of their assets, thereby avoiding the moral risk present in many insurance schemes and, for this reason, they also present advantages with respect to Severance Payments.”
But whichever path is chosen, be it to seek an alternative to unemployment or to continue with it with changes, for the reform of the Labor Code to have sufficient merits of a great agreement, it must make the stone disappear. of the employer’s shoe.
