Alberto Núñez Feijóo has rescued the main intellectual author of the 2012 labor reform for his revamped economic team, which will operate under the coordination of the Treasury Minister of Andalusia and the new strong man of the PP in economic matters, Juan Bravo. Javier Thibault, who was General Director of Employment during the entire period of government of Mariano Rajoy and right-hand man of the Minister of Labor, Fátima Báñez, will be the new head of the Employment, Pensions, Self-Employed and Social Dialogue area in the new Popular Executive that the party has announced this Monday.
Thibault, Doctor of Law and consultant on labor matters in a well-known Madrid office, is pointed out from the field of social dialogue as the true promoter of the most audacious measures of the controversial labor reform approved by the Rajoy Government in 2012 and which garnered so much applause in international organizations such as the International Monetary Fund or the European Commission, which has explicitly defended it against the counter-reformist offensive championed by the Minister of Labor and third vice president, Yolanda Díaz, as well as criticism from the union flank, which has considered as a wall to knock down from the very moment of its approval in February 2012.
Thibault’s appointment underlines the will of the PP to turn the workplace into another pole of confrontation with the Government of Pedro Sánchez, which has assumed the repeal of the labor reform as one of the lines of force of its speech despite skepticism in this regard by Nadia Calvino.
What was announced a priori, and in some cases was sold a posteriori, as a repeal of the labor reform, has only managed to deactivate specific aspects of the rule approved by the Government of Mariano Rajoy. Among them, the most outstanding, the reinstatement of ultra-activity in collective bargaining and the recovery of the prevalence of the sectoral agreement over the company agreement.
It is precisely, as confirmed by a former position of the Ministry of Employment at the time of Fátima Báñez, of two of the issues that Thibault most firmly defended in the negotiations around the labor reform. The obsession then was to make the labor market more flexible to facilitate as much as possible the entry of workers into employment in a context in which the unemployment rate had skyrocketed to 24% and the number of unemployed people exceeds five million.
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