Spanish Ministry of Work publishes Labor Inspection Authority’s Strategic Plan for 2021-2023

On December 3, 2021, the Official State Gazette (BOE) published the Labor and Social Security Inspection Authority’s Strategic Plan for 2021-2023, determining a range of objectives, grouped into four broad pillars. It contains a very extensive list of measures, notably including:

1. Contributing to enhancing the quality of employment, ensuring workers’ rights, equality, and efforts to combat precarious work and fraudulent employment and social security practices.

• Falling within this pillar are a number of objectives in relation to which labor and social security inspectors’ work will be directed, among other aims, at:
• Ensuring that workers can exercise their employment and union rights fully and effectively, by combating all types of unfair and fraudulent practices in employment: salary, work time, fraudulent practices in connection with contracts, collective labor agreements, union rights, domestic work, false self-employed workers, false interns, digital platforms and remote work / telework.
• Uncovering unreported work and improving the protection of individuals who are trafficked to be exploited in work or services.
• Working towards sustainability of the social security system and monitoring governing funding to support employment (with particular emphasis on examining potential fraudulent practices in the use of suspension and reduction of working hours procedures).
• Verifying conditions for protection against COVID-19 at workplaces.
• Initiatives to ensure health and safety of workers, increasing the work of labor and social security inspectors in this field and issuing a technical standard on psychosocial risks.
• Combating crossborder fraudulent practices (including the approval of a technical standard on crossborder assignments).
• Ensuring compliance with equality and nondiscrimination rules, by carrying out activities in the field of gender discrimination, focusing particularly on companies’ equality plans, and supervising the pay gap and collective bargaining to avoid discriminatory clauses.
• Strengthening the role of labor and social security inspectors’ reports in collective layoff procedures and suspension and reduction of working hours procedures and promoting amendments to the legislation to increase their actions in these processes.

2. Strengthening labor and social security inspectors’ abilities to take action. In this section, it notes the need to amend the Labor Inspection System Law to adapt it to the digital environment. It also describes the need to review the Labor and Social Security Infringements and Penalties Law to update labor and employment law infringements to a new reality and strengthen the deterrent-related treatment of certain infringing conduct.
3. Strengthening and modernizing the labor and social security inspection system to improve quality in provision of the service to citizens. One of the main new elements involves initiatives carried out by issuing assessments using artificial intelligence tools.
4. Increasing the international activities of labor and social security inspectors to promote honest work and strengthen international cooperation for combating fraud.