The Council of Ministers will approve today a new package of measures to care for those affected by DANA. Among these measures, a new legislative figure appears: “paid climate leave”, which reinforces the protection of employees in a climate alert situation.
Climate change reaches the Workers’ Statute. The new climate permit that the Council of Ministers will approve assumes that extreme climate phenomena (DANA, heat waves, etc.) will be increasingly frequent in our country. Therefore, it is necessary to clarify in which cases employees can be absent from their jobs so as not to put their safety at risk in the face of the risk of climate catastrophes such as the one that has claimed 222 victims in the DANA that hit Valencia, Castilla. La Mancha and the eastern part of Andalusia.
The new permit proposed by the Ministry of Labor recognizes new permits of up to four days for “impossibility of going to the workplace, extendable until the circumstances disappear. If more days are necessary, companies could justify ERTE of force majeure facing with public co-responsibility”, detailed from the Ministry.
Speed up decisions in the event of an alert. Many of the victims of the Valencia DANA died on the way to or returning from their jobs, because the companies did not correctly apply the protection measures contemplated in articles 20 and 21 of the Workers’ Statute. These articles left the responsibility of protecting their workers in the hands of companies in the face of a serious and imminent risk to their health in climate alert situations introduced by Decree-Law 4/2023.
The new climate permit expedites this decision by reinforcing article 64 of the Workers’ Statute and leaving in the hands of the workers’ representatives the ability to paralyze the activity that is already included in the Occupational Risk Prevention Law in its articles 20 and 21, as well as the case of not being able to go to work due to the consequences of these climatic phenomena, which is contemplated in article 4.4 of these regulations. That is, the new climate permit does not provide any regulations that do not already exist in labor legislation, but it shortens the action steps in the event of a climate alert from the AEMET or any other authorized body.
Four days without losing salary before the ERTE. As Yolanda Díaz, second vice president and Minister of Labor and Social Economy, explained in an interview on RTVE, “the permits are going to be four days. No worker has to run any risk. From those four days onwards, companies will be able to locate to those workers as a cause of force majeure and take advantage of an ERTE”. The person responsible for Labor has recalled that these permits will be remunerated, both in salary and contributions.
According to Ministry sources, after these four days of climate leave, companies have two options: take advantage of the ERTE, or extend this paid leave to their workers on their own. So far, 2,539 companies have taken advantage of ERTE due to force majeure as a result of DANA, directly affecting 27,765 people.
Mandatory protocols in agreements. The new measures also seek to reinforce the action protocols in the face of adverse climate phenomena from the collective agreements applied by companies. In this way, the Ministry seeks to ensure that both companies and employees know how to act in a risk situation due to extreme weather phenomena.
Companies will have a period of 12 months to define these protocols. “There is no better place than each of the companies (to design these protocols) based on the activity they provide or the needs they have to adjust those protocols that are now going to be part of our lives. We give certainty to standards that range from the hand of the climate emergency,” said Yolanda Díaz.
In WorldOfSoftware | If the question is whether you have to go to work with a DANA, the BOE gives the answer: it depends on the AEMET
Image | Unsplash (Spencer Davis), WorldOfSoftware
