Representatives of the employer sector delivered to the Senate your observations and proposals to the project of reform to the Labor Code without leaving behind layoffa topic whose controversy with union members caused legislators to analyze the piece, maintaining this aspect as it currently appears in Law 16-92.
The businessmen made their proposals in a letter to the president of the senateRicardo de los Santos.
In the document, the president of the National Council for Private Enterprise (Conep), Celso Juan Marranzini and the president of the Employers’ Confederation of the Dominican Republic (Copardom), Laura Pena Izquierdoinsisted that it is “imminent” to hold “a objective discussionunbiased, founded and technical around the current model of layoff“.
In this way, the employers they remain firm in their defense proposals presented during the Tripartite Dialogue and that caused controversy among the union class, which would include changes in the conditions under which the union is paid. layoff after an eviction, such as:
- Consider a average salary accrued instead of the worker’s last year of salary to calculate the layoff
- Establish a ten salary cap minimums of the sector, to determine the base salary for its calculation, taking into account that only 0.7% of the total workers earn more than 250,000 pesos
- Place a six year limit for the sum of twenty-three days of ordinary salary for each year of service provided to the company, a payment that currently applies indefinitely to every worker who has more than five years in a company, according to article 80, paragraph 4, of Law 16-92
- Extend the probation of the new workers, eliminating paragraph 1 of the aforementioned article
- Consider other alternatives to the layoffas insurance or (unemployment) fund
- Create a reserve or provision deductible (total or partial) of Income Tax, recording its variation annually
- Reduce the contributions (or a percentage) of what the employer must make by law to the capitalization account individual of its workers from the entry into force of the new law.
“In any scenario, the proposals reflected here respect the acquired rights of workers and could contribute to the adaptation of a obsolete model“, underlines the letter, which urges addressing the issue with responsibility to respond to the needs of the current and future economy, reducing workloads and informality.
Proposals not considered
In addition to this, the business unions thirteen others pointed out proposals that are currently outside the initiative labor reformamong them:
- Define the ordinary salary for the calculation of labor benefits and rights, differentiating it from incentives, bonuses and gratuities and excluding all types of per diemone of the aspects “that has generated the most conflict” when determining it
- Let it be the Ministry of Labor whoever is empowered to authorize the hiring of foreigners in excess of the legal limit to expedite the procedures and adapt it to the institutional framework, a process that is currently carried out through the Presidency of the Republic
- Allow agreements between employers and workers to change the enjoyment mode of the license to breastfeed
- Allow a new work contract or service one month after completing a previous work or service, clarifying that under this modality the time would be the time actually worked by the worker. They also requested that the eviction also in these cases.
- Include the jurisprudence in which it is pointed out that the notice period runs in favor of the person to whom it is granted.
In addition to addressing these issues, the leaders of Conep and Copardom made nine observations on the draft reform of the Labor Code, among which the following stand out:
Place a maximum limit of six months’ salary for the astreinte, in cases in which the file that orders it is in a state of failure. Currently, the modification to article 86 of the Labor Code (Art. 12 of the project) excludes a period from the calculation, which would generate “a risk of disproportionate sanctions.”
The modification to article 102 (Art. 17 of the project) warns of “excessive formalisms” in the drafting of a dismissal letter that “burdens” the employer, by preventing him from including generic causes in order to comply with legal deadlines. Furthermore, he considers it “unnecessary” to include a notion of “abuse of law” that could give the judge discretion in a trial.
They propose that the “period of three calendar days” be eliminated for the hearing of the production and discussion of the evidence in the modification to article 546 (Art. 56 of the project), which would leave an indefinite period.
In the modification to article 548 (Art. 57 of the reform) they propose maintaining the wording as agreed within the framework of the tripartite dialogue, which did not include sharing the list of witnesses (with data such as their ID, address, employment and who they work for) to the opposing party, under the plea of ensuring the “right to defense.”
In the changes to article 720 (Art. 76 of the project) it is considered that the limit of 50 minimum wages as a sanction for large companies that commit serious offenses (such as failing to comply below the minimum wage, reducing it, avoiding the payment of overtime or violating occupational health and safety regulations) continues to be “disproportionate”, and they urged that the regime maintain the proportionality between the infraction and the sanction.
Status of the project in the Senate
On September 30, the Senate approved first reading the legislative piece was already unanimous, after being read in its entirety in the session.
Senator Rafael Barón Duluc (Cholitín), president of the commission that studied the piece, reiterated that the figure of the layoff is maintained.
