The inevitable conflict of interests between employers and employees of the country continues to be very focused on the firm opposition of the labor sector to any possible reform of the Work code touch, even minimally, the obligation to pay advance notice and severance pay to workers while employer leaders insist that the current compensation scheme is unsustainable “for all adverse effects” what it means for them.
The business community clings to the position that evictions are, due to their current magnitude and lack of reasonable ceilingscontrary to the financial stability of businesses and go against the convenience of driving the working population towards the formal sphere of the economy in which they would theoretically enjoy the protection of law that would be most convenient for you.
The trade union leaders, in a country where the labor force is scarcely adhered to the union, have maintained with one voice that they would never allow the elimination of severance payincluding in its rejection the possibility of allowing unemployment insurance to emerge as a substitute for established conquests.
It would be about a mechanism to be powered with the contributions of the potential beneficiaries, which would also probably lead the treasury and employers to participate in the financing, a scheme similar to that of the pension funds that still do not guarantee acceptable returns for those who reach retirement age and the limitations of the health coverage that affects the worst way to those who leave the productive life.
Insurers do not want affiliates with physical decline and sickly old age.
Can read: They consider it a priority to preserve pension funds and reform Social Security
The Egg and the Stone
no glimpse an intermediate and Solomonic exit although the employers have turned to the tripartite dialogue with aspirations to take into account models and experiences from other countries to replace the pure and simple dismissal, since in the framework of labor rights the International Labor Organization (ILO) is in favor of that for employee-employer relations there is always room for compromise.
In his doctrine appears a historical position in favor of “symmetry of rights” between the employer and the worker so that either of them can terminate the contractual relationship by means of a simple notification “without having to explain the reasons or submit to procedural rules”.
Although it takes into account the convenience of subscribing collective agreements on working conditions (with force of law) and legislative changes are promoted, the ILO does not fail to recognize that employers usually have greater bargaining power to protect your interests.
This has happened in the Dominican Republic every time that the rivalry between members of the helpless proletariat and the entities of the tenacious capitalism tends to resemble the unequal relationship between the egg and the stone that always puts the oval object as the absolute loser. send chickens and other oviparous.
business objection
Regarding what it costs to keep employees on the payroll, the private entities wield a memorial of grievances that begins by arguing that they represent the 65% of the total cost of producing or providing servicesconsidered by them as the highest percentage in Latin America.
In the breakdown of cost-producing factors, they maintain in their speech the affirmation that the calculation that is applied here to paying benefits is 16% higher than the average of the other countries in the region, so they hope that the total labor cost is somehow reduced by up to 22%.
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To achieve a decrease, among other steps, the business community is aiming its guns against what it calls the contracting of complementary health insurance as a detail of the Social Security System that they implicitly consider a fundamental expense of their relations with the labor force that would justify putting out of context the obligation to pay severance pay.
In the package of fixed expenditures with which they describe the called labor cost excessive they place the different percentages that it entails incessantly defraying: advance notices, layoffs, vacations, Family Health Insurancehealth insurance supplement, Infotepquotas for accidents at work, contributions to Pension Fund Administrators (AFP) and bonuses.
They ignore, of course, that in the country it is not applied, for justice and with universal scope in favor of the workers, the annual cost of living indexation to salaries and that the average or prevailing salary It reached RD$28,502.76 in 2021, a little above the previous year but always below what is needed monthly for the basic support of a family, which is RD$40,074.16, especially for those who are in the middle of the scale Social without reaching the dream clearance.
Coincidence
In it Economic and Social Council, CESa public consultation body open to the spectrum of sectors and to the purposes of reforms, is on the agenda to modify the Social Security System and the Government has gone so far with the idea of creating consensus to establish “an unemployment insurance fund, respecting acquired rights”, with which it avoids being openly against unemployment, implying that it would prefer it to remain.
From its top leadership, Creole unionism sees in the government’s criteria a closeness to the approach of the Dominican Association of Pension Fund Administrators (Adafp) who has said before Congress and the press that workers must be protected from dismissal with a “unemployment fund” which, surely, would have to sustain the labor sector itself.
As well as “all roads lead to rome”according to a well-known expression, the debate in recent years on the possible final destination of labor benefits has always reached the initiative of create unemployment insurance as an alternative to a possible elimination of unemployment whose payment is only mandatory for dismissals without just cause.
And the reasons for not paying it are remarkably diverse: when the employer understands that your employee deceived as to his real preparation; works showing disability; it is considered that it disturbs the order in the company during the work; incurs alleged lack of probity and honesty while off duty; commits acts of any nature against his superiors; intentionally causes material damage or his words are judged as insulting and a wake more possibilities than it would be long to enumerate.
