The Labor and Social Security Inspection will pay special attention to the use that companies make of the trial period, as reported by Cadena SER and sources from the organization have confirmed to this newspaper. The objective of this campaign, which the department led by Yolanda Díaz will launch shortly, is to check “possible non-compliance in relation to the trial period of employment contracts.”
The Workers’ Statute establishes that the trial period should not exceed six months for qualified technicians or two months for other workers, although the agreement may establish lower maximum periods. Labor’s suspicion is that some companies are making fraudulent use of this figure, rushing until the last days before it ends, and that they are even applying several trial periods to the same employee. With the end of the trial period, the settlement is paid, but not compensation.
Inspection sources confirm that they will “especially” verify contracts “that are terminated for not exceeding the trial period despite having exceeded its maximum duration, as well as the dismissals of workers who do not exceed the trial period despite having been previously hired to perform the same functions.” This last case clashes head-on with the regulations: an employee should not face a new trial period if he has already performed those tasks.
According to Cadena SER, dismissals of workers during the trial period grew by 848% in May 2022. This increase occurs after the labor reform, which limits the scenarios in which companies can resort to temporary contracts. Thus, the proportion of this type of contracts with respect to the total has fallen from 26% to 16%. According to Labor, from this limit on temporality, some companies would be making fraudulent use of the trial period. However, they highlight that since the entry into force of the labor reform, 91% of the trial periods have been passed.
“Through the Anti-Fraud Tool, the Labor Inspection will look for possible irregularities to prevent some companies from resorting to formulas that undermine the rights of workers and represent an obstacle to free competition between companies,” they add. Inspection.