The Minister of Labor, Gloria Inés Ramirez, highlighted the importance of the labor reform project, filed before the Congress of the Republic and which is based on article 53 of the political constitution that mandates the congress to issue the labor statute.
(See here the complete text of the labor reform).
According to the aforementioned article, the corresponding law will take into account at least the following fundamental minimum principles: Equal opportunities for workers; minimum vital and mobile remuneration, proportional to the quantity and quality of work; employment stability, among others.
“It seems to me that when they say that the labor reform is a union document, what it reflects is a lack of knowledge of regulations, both national and international, this is a system of checks and balances in a different way in the world of work, but above We are all responding to the recommendations of the OIT, we are responding to the sentences that the Constitutional Court has in this matter and to the right to strike that is in the Political Constitution”pointed out, the Minister of Labor.
According to the head of the labor portfolio, the reform seeks to restore the rights of workers in terms of working hours, such as night, Sunday and holiday surcharges. Employment is a public policy and the state must guarantee it as mandated by the constitution in its article 54. On the other hand, work is a fundamental right.
(Garments and clothing would become more expensive due to labor reform).
“They are saying that the labor reform does not create jobs and does not attack informality, I want to tell Colombians that informality has been sustained since 1990 in this country, this is a structural problem and for this It has to clearly see economic policies, not just the labor relationship, that is why it is a fallacy that they tell us that with labor relations we expand or eliminate informality”pointed out, Gloria Inés Ramírez.
Within the project, Work for Change, there are chapters aimed at directly reducing informality, for example, traditionally informal populations such as: Domestic workers, who total nearly 700,000, formalization for migrant workers regardless of their nationality , athletes, workers and workers of digital delivery platforms that with the reform could formalize more than 100 thousand and the creation of the agricultural wage that would impact informality in this sector that is at 86%. This measure seeks to formalize close to 1 million 500 thousand rural workers and workers (self-employed and day laborers).
“In the labor reform we provide elements so that all the workers who are today in the informal sector as well as in the countryside, we are talking about an agricultural contract that will enable them to access social security, in the same way for workers who do seasons , which are seasonal in urban centers, harvest seasons and in the tourism sector, have the possibility of a partial contract, but with rights”, said, the senior official.
(Why the labor reform would affect the employment of householders).
Finally, he recalled that in at least three judgments of the Constitutional Court, Law 789 of 2002, which reduced the acquired rights of workers, has been described as “regressive”. Likewise, the attorney for 2011, Edgardo Maya, made the following statement before the Congress of the Republic regarding Law 789: “A sample of the inefficiency generated by the validity of this law requires the following scheme: in the four-year 2003-2006 according to the government, 710,000 jobs would be generated as a result of the labor reform; According to the Comptroller General of the Republic and the Observatory of the Labor Market and Social Security, in said period only between 160,000 and 200,000 were generated respectively, that is, one fifth of the proposed goal (22%).
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