• The president of the Spanish employers of the Social Economy, Juan Antonio Pedreño, supports the need to ensure the payment of unemployment benefits, but considers that in extraordinary situations such as the one we are experiencing, the Government should explore other ways and means of Extraordinary financing for these benefits without undermining the rights of the workers.
• This measure limits the ability of the Autonomous Communities to act in matters related to active employment policies, because it reduces the training and retraining actions that will be more necessary than ever to enhance the labor market.
• CEPES, as the Spanish employer of the Social Economy, has sent a position to the Government where it conveys its opinion on these adopted measures and how they can affect companies and entities of the Social Economy.
Madrid, April 8, 2020.- The Spanish Business Confederation of the Social Economy (CEPES) expresses its “uncertainty, suspicion and concern,” regarding the measures adopted by the Government regarding the Professional Training Funds.
The position that CEPES has sent to the Government reveals “uncertainty” in the face of difficulties in knowing the amounts that the Autonomous Communities will have for training in the year 2020; "Suspicion", due to the lack of security in the final destination of these funds, at a time when they will be essential for the recovery of economic activity by the business community; and “caution” due to the possible consequences that these measures may generate in the rest of the active employment policies that the Autonomous Communities execute.
“We consider it vitally important that extraordinary ways to finance unemployment benefits be explored, so that the Vocational Training Funds are used for the necessary training and retraining of workers at such an especially relevant moment as the one we are experiencing. ” The President of CEPES, Juan Antonio Pedreño , has specified.
"In view of this situation and the apparent change in these regulations, at CEPES we express our position regarding the measure taken, despite the fact that we understand and support the need to ensure the payment of unemployment benefits in this very complex situation, but we consider that they must be explore other avenues and modalities of financing these measures , without undermining the rights of companies' workers and the tools of the different public employment services to have the funds and resources necessary to manage the post-crisis health care Pedreño stressed. ,
The reasons why CEPES believes that this measure can directly affect companies and entities of the Social Economy are:
• The measure directly affects the ability of the Autonomous Communities to act in matters related to active employment policies , which will see limited and substantially reduced initiatives to offer training for the employment of employed and unemployed workers.
• In all these programs of the Autonomous Communities, the representative entities and companies of the Social Economy participate , given their special characteristics of continuous commitment to training in the workplace, training associated with job stability or training of groups that present greater difficulties of employability and that require these policies as a channel for their access toWork market.
• The Autonomous Communities must become a key agent in the recovery of normality as soon as we overcome this health crisis, for which we consider that they should be especially supported in all those incentives associated with the recovery of activity and employment, among the that training, the development of professional qualification and retraining courses for unemployed people, or for workers who must reorient their professional skills and qualifications, and training for all those groups of people with greater employability difficulties that, once more, they may be left behind in this social and economic crisis.
• In addition, the agreed measure and the new distribution that it entails will generate a rethinking of the financing of regional initiatives in the field of active employment policies , which are going to be proposed and reformulated, so that companies and entities of the Social Economy can be affected in the distribution based on these new criteria, given that they participate in the rest of the axes of the active employment policies that are agreed with the Communities and incorporated in the Annual Plan of Employment Policy.
